Snooze button

Some say that it is the worst function ever invented, I never had a problem with it until two months ago when I joined the illuminati “The enlightened ones”. Chill I didn’t sell my soul to the devil, my eyes were just opened to things I wasn’t aware of, the fog is gone a lil bit, I can see a bit clearly now.

I mean who in their normal lives hates the snooze button, let’s be honest here, to an ignorant eye that is the greatest invention ever. Snooze is the ‘happy button’, it is to school children and the work force what the G-Spot is to females. On that cold winter morning when the ‘bloody alarm’ goes off, you don’t even wake, you would just take out your hand and navigate your way to “snooze”, and when you find that button the pleasure just goes down your spine as you retract your hand to enjoy more sleep. The bigger they are the better, I have those big side table alarm clocks, so you can imagine how good it is to hit that.

The irony is that we set the alarm just before we sleep, we tell it exactly when to wake us up and the alarm delivers, not a second early nor late. But what do we do? We hit the snooze button, this is just another way to prove that most of us don’t know what we want.

The funny thing there is one HUGE SNOOZE button we would all love to hit over and over again. Imagine if the grim ripper existed, he would come to you and tell you “yhow my nigga, it’s time. Hell is a soul short, let’s bounce” [ok let me be optimistic, even heaven maybe, you know what you have sowed and what you going to reap] and as the grim ripper was talking, reading out your rights like the LAPD does, “you have the right to remain silent, everything you did while walking the Earth will be used against you, you have the right to…” BAAAM, you hit the snooze button, he disappears. Damn that would be sweet, I’d set my snooze at intervals of 5 years, just to remind myself to keep working harder because I won’t be here for ever, because sometimes we forget that.

Or imagine you are at this party [or church service] and it’s on fire. Everyone is drunk, whether it’s the holy ghost or alcohol, but no one is themselves, and no one is standing straight, the place is just on fleek  and you want that moment to last just a lil bit longer, or forever. You would just keep hitting the snooze button right???But nah, it doesn’t work like that, and the mere fact that nature does not allow you to do that should tell you something about the snooze button, yes, it shouldn’t exist. Everything has its own time and what came must go. The Xhose people spoke of this: “inkomo yob’thongo ityiwa ziinduku” and eish, induku zobomi… are something else, if you thought your mom can beat, wait until life serves you.

A quick example about snoozing life, professionals call it a “mid-life crisis” and oh yes it is a crisis. When you have grown ass man partying, screaming YOLO and sleeping around with kids in his forties. What happens in such a situation?? The nigga has a household, a wife and kids. He will invest a good portion of his money in his party life, because “ufriday maka fane nomnye right”. Meaning the kids will lose the extra tiny pleasure of life to some random bitches, that will lead to him having financial problems at home, trust me money is frustrating, so him and his wife will argue a lot, one day the wife will find out he is cheating, she will divorce him, she will win the court case and get everything, now the nigga has to start over, a new life in the sense of he must now rent a flat, buy new furniture and appliances and after all this, he will still support his old household via child and spousal support. All just because he chose to snooze life.

The habits we practice as children are almost directly proportional to the adults we grow up to be. Ever heard of the saying “late for school, late for work”, this simply means what you are doing in your youth will easily be a habit in your adulthood. And habits have a way to attach themselves to a person, you can’t tell them to go and they obey, you have to fight them. And that a fight a few string willed people can win, in Xhosa it goes “is’qhelo siya yoyisa ingqondo”. I honestly though that when it was time to grow up, I would just hit some button and baaam, the childhoodness in me would disappear and I would be an adult, but nope, doesn’t work like that. And am screwed.

But it is not too late for the young ones we know, we can help them practice habits that will be fruitful in their adult life. A quick example would be financial education, we could educate the youth on how to spend money, difference between good and bad debt, how to save, how and when to invest. How to buy groceries efficiently, how to clean your own place, how to cook. Such small things can’t just happen by themselves when we are old, you plant the seed and it grows, it’s already too late for me, am learning the hard way, but it is not too late for the young one YOU know.

People have to wake up, both figuratively and literally. The snooze button wastes your life, those extra five minutes have a ripple effect on one’s life. And we all know it’s never just 5 minutes, its 5 on 5 on 5 and so on, on average, the snooze would add up to 30 minutes. And in that 30 minutes, you could have walked around the block and improved your heart health, read a few pages on a book and enriched your mind, put a few colours on that painting you’re working on and soon have an achievement of your goals and victory for yourself, played with the kids or made love to your wife and move closer to achieving a ‘happy family’, maybe you could have revised what you did yesterday in class or pre-read a few pages for today’s lecture. My point is you could have done anything that would contribute to your life and the things you love.

Why do you think there are lines such as:

"You snooze you lose"

"The early bird catches the fat worm"

"sleep is for the weak"

"No one looks back on their life and remembers all the nights they had plenty of sleep"

"Some people dream of success, others wake up to achieve it"

"I'll sleep when i am dead"

Hey sleep is good, I know, but our sleep time has turned into TV time, how about you reverse the trade, just for 1 month and see what will happened. If by the end of that month you don’t feel happier, and have achieved more of the things you love than the things you have to do, its fine, you can go back to watching TV at night and hit that snooze in the morning. Do we have a deal???

Good!!! So from now on, NO MORE SNOOZE…

"The amount of sleep required by the average person is five minutes more."-Wilson Mizener

-M. Hlazo