Five minutes is a long time if you are waiting in the rain. It is a long time if you are late leaving the house and a child is visiting the toilet, finding a jumper and tying shoe-laces. It is a long time if you are waiting for a much missed friend to call. It is a long time to stare at a breath-taking sunset or hold a crying child.
It is not very long if that is all the time you have for a cup of tea or to clean the bathroom. It is not very long if you want to start the next activity in five minutes but have not cleared this one up yet or you just have that long to chat.
There are countless little house-hold jobs that might only take five minutes: a phone call, a quick dust, polishing the dining table or folding the towels, but there are not enough five minutes to get all those jobs done and so life is littered with messiness that would only take five minutes to sort out and the demon voices berate that it really can't be that hard to get it all done.
Five minutes is all it would take to look at a book with a child whose reading is blossoming or to listen to an enthusiastic pre-teen explain his love of Dickens. And sometimes five minutes peace and quiet seems like an impossible hope.
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