Just 5 more minutes

Bloodshot eyes greet the buzzer sounds. You repeat the phrase endlessly begging Father Time to give you five measly minutes. 300 Seconds. Is it that much? It doesn’t matter. You won’t get those five minutes back. And if I’m sure of anything, it’s that the vast majority of people beg for these precious few minutes every day.

Five more minutes to finish my meal. Five more minutes to sleep. Five minutes to generously scrub my genitals rather than the halfass rinsing most of us do every morning. That’s all we want. Five more minutes. Not an hour or two. Not even half an hour. Hell not even fifteen minutes. We just want five damn minutes. Or so we think.

Many utter those four little words, possibly five if you finish it with ‘please’; but do we really know what we want them for? Are we going to make the most out of each second or are we going to stare at the wall and later be pissed off that we were just sniffing our own flatulence rather than being as post modernly productive as we could be with said time allotment?

“Five more minutes.”

For what? What could you possibly accomplish in five minutes? What difference could five minutes make? If you say that you were just five minutes late, why ask for just five minutes when you desperately need time?

You see, we casually use these time references that truly mean other things. When you ask for five minutes, at the best you want time to get your head straight and achieve a more ideal mindset than is the case when you ask for it. What about when you’re asked to stay an extra “five minutes”. You know this is bullshit because just the process of dialing a number, greeting a receptionist, dialing an extension and finding someone can take upwards of five minutes. My conclusion is that none of us really value the worth of five minutes, but here are a few examples of how five minutes have changed my life.

#1: Five minutes allowed me to meet my current girlfriend and it changed my life. She just gave me 5 minutes of her time and in short notice, she changed the way she saw me, we became extremely good friends and later, thanks to another five minutes she gave me, we ended up together.

#2: With five more minutes, I could have said goodbye to my grandma and my father. I arrived moments after they both passed away.

#3: Five minutes has let me beat a massive line at the bank and for lunch on I don’t know how many occasions. Moments after I get there and while I’m ordering, a horde of people arrive.

#4: An additional five minutes of surfing has had me taking an epic wave rather than a shitty ripple on more than one occasion.

#5: Five minutes late to an interview can sometimes guarantee that you’ve fucked up, but my five minutes early got me two jobs.

#6: Five minutes has been the difference between seeing a perfect sunset or just another drab purple horizon.

#7: Leaving five minutes earlier from parties has meant me missing out on someone whom I wanted to see.

#8: Five more minutes in an exam has meant the difference between passing or failing.

#9: Five minutes on the phone has yielded surf reports, traffic situations, congratulations, good AND bad news, and even a job opportunity.

#10: Five minutes worth of battery would have been the difference in many an emergency.


The situations are endless yet we treat five minutes as if they were nothing, as if they really didn’t mean anything and we ask for them in the most trivial of circumstances. Next time you ask for five minutes, take a few seconds to review your request and see just how bad you need those five minutes.

As for me, thanks for giving up five minutes or so of your time so you could read this.

Cheers.