As I have gotten older I have become much more conscious to the passing of time – even down to the mere seconds. Occasionally a student in band class will get my attention, wanting to say something, and then change her mind after I turn all my attention to her. At that point I will say jokingly, “You just wasted three seconds of my life – and I am not getting any younger!”
In fact, it can be revealing to think about how much of our time is spent on particular tasks. I have calculated, using my rusty math skills, how much time I will have spent doing work-related things during the course of a projected thirty-five year career teaching seventh through twelfth graders.
Correcting rhythms: 2 hours
Correcting key signatures: 2 hours 20 minutes
Selling reeds: 3 days
Pulling mouthpieces: 3 days
Talking in rehearsal: 1.07 years
Conducting: 2 years
Telling corny jokes: 3 days
Telling good jokes: 12 hours
Attending football games: 39 days
Teaching private lessons: 1.2 years
On the phone (texting, talking, e-mailing): 81 days
Working with kids who skip auditions or solo and ensemble performances: 20 hours
Marching in parades: 8.75 hours
Tightening the bottom of music stands: 1 hour 10 minutes
Complaining in the teacher’s lounge: 1 hour (Hey, nobody’s perfect.)
Picking up trash off the band room floor: 1 hour 15 minutes
Paperwork: 1.6 years
Driving a bus: 60 hours (Thank goodness for parent volunteers – they have saved lives!)
Attending band conventions: 100 days
Attending in-service sessions at school: 29 days
Parent-teacher conferences: 17.5 days
In his imaginative, inventive, and unorthodox book Sum, author David Eagleman introduces forty vignettes of the afterlife, each of which sheds a little light on the here and now. In the chapter from which the book gets its title, Eagleman presents an afterlife where you relive all of your experiences, but they are reshuffled so that all of the moments that share a quality are grouped together. You sleep for thirty years, but have seven years of insomnia. You wait in lines for five years, wash clothes for three years, watch TV for nine years, and spend over a year looking for lost items. You take all of your pain at once – giving birth, breaking bones, nursing cuts and bruises – all in twenty-seven intense hours. (If Eagleman was thinking of band directors like me he may have added driving back and forth to school 24 hours a day for 266 days, making copies at a copier for 51 days, and spending time worrying about things that never happen for 122.5 hours.) But at some point during this different order of things you realize how blissful it would be if you had a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces, where moments do not endure, where one, as Eagleman puts it, “experiences the joy of hopping from one event to the next like a child hopping from spot to spot on the burning sand.”
Blessedly, that is how our life is; and if we choose not to focus too much on specific events, particularly the unpleasant ones, and learn to enjoy life in its bite-sized pieces, it will be time well spent indeed.
