The Six-Minute Mile

October 28, 2024

While working at the fruit store, I developed an ingenious method for conceptualizing time. You see, I spent much of the day stood right in front of a cash register which displayed the current time in the top right corner. Loyal readers will know that clocks are my sworn enemy, and that I consider it my duty in life to not know the time unless I put in a concerted effort to find it out. (For example, to find out the time while sat at my PC, I must open my web browser and type “timeanddate.com” into the address bar.) So having a clock right in front of me all day, at a job where I was either A) looking at that screen, or B) not doing anything at all, was a serious problem.

When working an eight-hour shift at a dull job, one will consciously or unconsciously start organizing time in ways that make it seem to pass most effortlessly. Probably the most common way to do this involves taking breaks at set times. For example, you will come to think of 9:00 as “one hour until coffee break.” Breaking the day down into chunks that are each only a few hours long is far less daunting than facing the entirety of an eight-hour period.

However, some jobs are so dull that even this method starts to falter. The idea that there are whole hours until the next break becomes unthinkable; the time needs to be broken down still further. You start inserting micro-breaks: for example, every half an hour, you might take a little walk around the area in front of the register. The best thing that can happen is that a half-hour is too busy for you to successfully complete your walk, and you end up putting it off for an extra ten or fifteen minutes. There’s no greater feeling than taking the 10:30 walk at 10:43, knowing that you basically conned the world out of thirteen minutes.

But half an hour is still quite a long time if you’re doing absolutely nothing at all. And the truth is, a little walk around the register is not particularly exciting. We need to get more granular, and we need to embrace the time having passed itself as a reward, without having to throw in such superfluities as a little walk. This is where the “six-minute mile” comes into play.

The “six-minute mile” is what I just now decided to name the ingenious method of time-keeping that I hinted at in the first sentence of this essay. I explained the “six-minute mile” to my wife at dinner yesterday and she said that nobody else in the world would ever have come up with it or found it useful. Well, if you don’t find it handy, you may at least find it handsome. Perhaps the only value in sharing the six-minute mile comes from imparting the knowledge that a man was once so wretched and despairing that the six-minute mile seemed a worthwhile thing to think of.

The essence of the theory goes like this: eight hours is a long time inside a store; three hours is a long time inside a store; one hour is a long time inside a store; half an hour is a long time inside a store; fifteen minutes is a long time inside a store; and ten minutes is a long time inside a store. These truths do not appear to the observer all at once — they appear gradually, one at a time, throughout years of study (i.e. working at a not-particularly-busy fruit store.)

The inverse side of this equation is that five minutes is actually quite a short time inside a store. Too short, in fact, for our purposes, because if you start reckoning minutes in groups of five, you realize all too soon that there are twelve in an hour, and a whopping twenty-four in two hours.

Five-minute chunks are also too clean and too easily roundable. You find yourself looking at the clock at 2:18 and thinking that it’s basically 2:20. Three minutes later, at 2:21, you look at the clock and it’s still essentially 2:20 — it’s as if nothing has happened at all. This rounding is so automatic, having been ingrained into us since childhood by the structure of our analog clocks, that it is impossible to suppress. 2:18 and 2:21 are, in essence, exactly the same time.

Hence, the six-minute mile. Six minutes is actually a slightly more practicable portion to divide an hour into, being one-tenth of the whole, rather than one-twelfth. I first discovered this while trying to determine how much money I was making each minute. I found that the easiest method was to divide my hourly salary by ten, and then divide that number by six. When I made $16/hr (CAD), I was making $1.60 every six minutes, or 160 cents every six minutes, or just under thirty cents a minute.

Dividing the hour into ten six-minute chunks is both relatively simple and remarkably awkward-feeling. In contrast to the five-minute intervals we are used to, six-minute intervals feel utterly alien (except, of course, thirty and zero, where the two intersect.) :06, :12, :18, :24, :30, :36, :42, :48, :54, :00. One will not unthinkingly find one’s self rounding to any of these numbers (aside from thirty and zero.) This is the true power of the six-minute mile.

Like I mentioned before, ten minutes is too long, and five minutes is too short. Ten minutes is too long to wait for a new “part” or “period” of one’s shift to begin, whereas five minutes doesn’t feel like a significant enough period to give the impression that time is truly passing. Nine, eight, and seven minutes don’t fit naturally into an hour, so our only real option here is six. The six-minute demarcations come rapidly enough to develop momentum, but each represents a decently significant chunk of time: one tenth of a whole hour! 5:18 and 5:24, because of their strange neither-five-nor-zero endings, feel like utterly distant times — between them lies a wide cavern of time that we have leapt across.

Now, perhaps the six-minute mile is only of use to the most desperate of men, and perhaps it is only to the most desperate of men that it makes any sense at all. Like many methods for dealing with wretchedness, it is only a stop-gap solution. If you find yourself reaching for the opiate that is the six-minute mile, it is probably best that you set about searching for a new location, or perhaps an entirely new field, in which to ply your trade. Personally, I only resorted to it during the long nights of my Final Fruit Store Winter, holding close to me the shining light of hope that was the phrase, “I gotta get outta here.”

The six-minute mile will only help you survive; it will not help you flourish. In fact, its very essence as a means of keeping time is antithetical to flourishing, for the true path to bliss lies in not dealing with clock-time at all. This being said, one cannot walk the path to bliss if one is trapped for eternity inside a fruit store with no chance of escape. The fruit store imposes rules — the fruit store says that eight hours of clock-time is the duration of one's sentence. In order to make those eight hours pass, one must temporarily believe in the finitude of those eight hours.

The World's True Beauty lies in the understanding that these seconds and hours and minutes have no real existence at all, and that time passes (or refuses to pass) in ways that can not be represented by any number or shape at all. These very numbers and shapes are our prison.

Had I the power I seek — which I didn't, and possibly never will — I could have blissfully spent eternity in that fruit store, watching the "seconds" go by as "aeons," studying the movement from one moment to the next, and in that state I could have learned everything one can learn about this dear old world. I could have spent my lifetime in the contemplation of the oranges and yellows and greens of the oranges and lemons and limes, and been none the less wise for it all.

And yet I didn't, and couldn't! And why? Because I was born in this great big hoop, and it spins me round and round like a top! Because my knowledge turns to confusion and back again like the day turns to night! Because I yearn and I hope and I strive and I flop around on the floor like a fish!

Because I'm a person! I'm a person who invented the God-Forsaken Six-Minute Mile because I was bored! And I can never take that back!