From a young age,
children develop a fascination with watches. Many a watch is purchased at the
dollar store as a prize for young children who are earning their keep. The
disadvantage of this purchase is that the watches never work. The advantage, of
course, is that the child has no idea how to tell time. The watch, which is
worn upside down as often as it is worn right side up, is like a badge of
honor. If you ask a kid what time it is, you might get the kind of answer I did
when I queried my friend’s three-year-old grandson. Expertly flipping his wrist
around, he looked at his watch and said in a worried voice, “It’s 40 cents. I’m
late,” and he hurried off. I’m not sure if he was on his way to work or if he
just had a play date with the toys in the next room. Either way, time was of
the essence.
As we get older,
watches play a less important role in our lives. With the proliferation of cell
phones, many of us have relegated the watch to the status of “Shabbos watch,”
adorning our wrists only once a week. Despite being the proud owner of both a watch
and a phone, as I get older my fascination with time centers around my alarm
clock. One of the reasons for this is this is that I have a habit of waking up
at 3:00 a.m. Now, sometimes there is a good reason for this. For example, there
might be something I forgot to worry about during the day and feel it is my
duty to worry at three in the morning when there is absolutely nothing I can do
about it. Other times, I just find myself tossing and turning, while hoping and
praying that I can go back to sleep. At least I manage to turn it into a
religious experience.
Unfortunately,
part of the problem with going back to sleep is the pressure to go to back to
sleep “right now.” Many a moment has been spent staring at the clock thinking,
“If I go to sleep right now, I can still get __ hours of sleep.” You can fill
in the blank depending on your own level of insanity. Of course, when I look at
the clock five minutes later, I realize I’m losing ground. This of course
causes me additional stress since, for reasons beyond my control, my workday
begins at 7:30. Yes, that’s 7:30 a.m. This means leaving the house at
approximately 7:00, which in turn means that, if I want to get up at 6:30, I
have to start hitting the snooze button even earlier.
Based
on my neurotic sleep patterns, I am pretty sure that I get most of my REM sleep
during my snooze sessions, making them even more important. My goal is to
incorporate two snooze sessions into my nightly “seder.” Unfortunately, whoever had the power to decide the length
of the snooze session for my alarm clock, chose to set it for 9 minutes. I’m
not really sure what type of person programs an alarm clock to have a
nine-minute snooze session, but I certainly have a few questions for them.
Specifically, why couldn’t you have chosen five minutes or 10 minutes?
This means that if
I want to wake up at 6:30 – not that I ever want to wake up at 6:30 – I have
to set my alarm clock for 6:12 a.m.
Now, while most of
you have experience with the snooze button, there are probably very few of you who
have turned it into a religious experience. The desire to remind myself of the
mitzvos in the wee hours of the morning has inspired me to set my alarm to 6:13
instead of 6:12. This way, I figure, my two snoozing sessions are really
equivalent a 614th and 615th mitzva. On days when I
really want to make the mitzva mehudar
(otherwise known as being really exhausted), I hit the snooze button an
additional, third, time.
Amazingly, on days
like this, I can still make it to work and only be 10 minutes late – that’s nine
minutes for the additional snooze, plus one minute for my personal commitment
to the mitzvos. All in all, think that’s a pretty small price to pay for a
spiritual “awakening.”
