05.01.05
The Perfect Weekend Wakeup Time
So. After years of having this thought, this idea, this epiphany skulk around at the edges of my consciousness, I finally noted it, seized it, and am now bringing forward into the light to be identified by all! (Or, at least, the 2 or 3 people who read my blog regularly enough to notice.)
The idea, you ask? What can be so brilliant as to require such over-zealous and gregarious language?
The perfect awakening time for weekends. For those like me, anyway.
You see, weekend morning have always presented a battle between two sides of me: my lazy, unrepentant* side and the side that realizes that weekends are the time that I have to use for my own purposes. The lazy side always wishes to sleep until I can sleep no more, to be free of alarms, jarred awakeness, and urgency. The self-aware side is urgent, realizing that I have 48 short hours in which I am free to follow my own hopes, dreams, thoughts, and plans, before resuming the corporate drudgery of the work week.
But this morning… (O! Wonderful dawn!), I set my alarm for 9:30. The alarm went off, and I stumbled from my bed to turn it off and get back to my wondeful sleep. On so many other mornings, this has been my downfall. You see, when I am not sleeping, and my self-aware self is in control, sleep is an abomination upon my life. Would only that I could survive, happyily and productively, on only a few short hours of sleep! But no, once I begin to sleep, my sleep self is in control, and he has no recognition of all the myriad and wonderful things that I could be doing…indeed, he is a staunch pessimist and apologist. “But I could be doing things, learning, improving!” my self aware side will cry silenting. “Ah,” he replies, “but you will not. you will arrise, sit about your office surfing the web on weekdays (or worse, push papers), and play games and pace on weekends.” This morning however, the time was right, and my self-aware side was close enough to the surface to reassert control even as I pulled my blankets to my chin.
And as I lay there, my sleep-self and my conscious-self warring, it dawned upon me.
This was the perfect time. I considered. Yes! I had it. between 8:30 and 10 is the perfect time to awake on a weekend morning.
Before 8:30, if you do manage to force yourself to get up, you feel groggy. You wish for your bed and to return to sleep. You berate yourself, because it is as though you had to work today. And you eventually succomb to the rebellious sleep-self and take a nap.
After 10:00, you feel as though you have wasted your day. You must rush to accomplish all that you set out and still leave time for your mind to simply wander. The sun has already reached its peak, and is on the down swing, and as it falls, it takes your spirit with it.
But that short, magical hour and a half…when your conscious self can assert its logic upon your sleep-self, when you awake and you still are energized by the possibility of the day. When you can slowly and comfortably shower and gird yourself for the days skirmishes of wit and time and function….that is the time in which to awake.
So. New resolution. Get up between 8:30 and 10 every day of a weekend, regardless of when I went to bed.
I hope that this may aid someone else in their journey to self-awareness and control.
