The term “ten minutes” is all relative.
I grew up in a big city. There, things are “only” ten minutes away. If you live “only” ten minutes away from your office, well, that’s a miracle.
Most people have a twenty- to thirty-minute drive to and from work, and that’s in good traffic. Kids live fifteen minutes away from high school on a good day, but if the traffic is bad, and you’re even a little late, you’ll never find a parking spot.
A list of errands may take several days to complete.
If you get a parking space within eyesight of your target destination, you’re lucky. Sometimes it takes “only ten minutes” to get somewhere, but then another ten to park your car.
When I lived in the city, there were four grocery stores within ten minutes of my home. I was within fifteen minutes of a mall, and boy, did I think I was a lucky person.
My, my, how things have changed.
When I first moved to a smaller town, I had a list of errands to do, and budgeted three days to do them in. I was through by noon on the first day. I sat and wondered what on earth I would do to occupy all this free time I was going to have. I would have enough time to take up calligraphy or something.
Well, I don’t know where the free time went, because there isn’t any. But the term “ten minutes” has taken on new meaning.
If the kids want to go to Blockbuster, for instance, I cringe. That’s way on the other side of town, for crying out loud. It’s a full ten-minute drive over there.
And nine times out of ten, all five parking spaces at the front door are full, so we have to park way out on the second row.
Going to Walmart is the same thing. It takes a full seven or eight minutes to get there, and then I have to deal with the parking lot. I mean, I’ll drive up and down and up and down the rows of cars looking for that perfect spot. But many times I’m forced to park way out there … you know, ten or twelve cars from the front door.
If I’m in a real rush, I go to a smaller grocery store that’s three minutes away, instead of the big one that’s five minutes away.
I can’t believe I am the same person. The same person that thought getting home from work in twenty minutes was manna from Heaven now wonders how somebody can live out in the country, you know, where it takes fifteen minutes to get to work, with no traffic.
The same person who would park a mile away from the mall and relish the fact that I got a “good” parking spot now drives to one side of the square for one errand, and then drives to the other side to do the next. Heaven forbid walking more than ten paces anywhere.
The same person who thought being ten minutes away from something was a good thing now thinks ten minutes away is way too far.
It’s all relative.
