A genie appeared before me and my first wish is to control the flow of time forward and backwards and pause time. Assuming the genie will take my wish very literally what do I need to include to the full wish?
What should I ask for so I don’t kill myself by accident or end up in the middle of space?
Be sure to ask it to put you in another time stream or something. Otherwise going back and forward in time does nothing, as going back also rolls back your memory of the future and going forward is just our normal experience every day. Pausing would be bad, since you would not be able to unpause (as you are paused yourself). But even if it were paused and then resumed after something indeterminate happens, you would not have experienced that pause (nor would anything else in the universe), so it might as well not have happened.
You need to be way more precise with your wording, intent and requirements. And then the genie still screws you over, that’s kinda the point of the genie figure in myths.