It’s 5:18 am. My kid and I are standing in the garage, trying to figure out how to get the door open. The opener’s motor is making an odd sound and the door is stuck. We know there’s a way to open it by hand, but what is it? I wake up my husband, he demonstrates the manual bypass, and we get on our way.
I have been up since 4:40 am, and the day is already away from me.
Sleep is underrated in our culture. The 24-hour society gives people freedom to set the schedules that work best for them, but the end result seems to be scheduling everything but sleep. 6:00 am swimming practice? Why not?
The conventional advice for productivity and success includes getting up before everyone else and arriving at work before everyone else to get a jump on the day. Take advantage of the quiet to meditate, exercise, work on stretch projects, and plan the agenda. Too bad everyone else is doing the same thing in some crazed race to zero hour – with zero sleep.
Blame Thomas Edison. He not only needed just a few hours of sleep a night, but he also invented the electric light bulb so that no one else could sleep, either. Bill Clinton, Angela Merkel, and Margaret Thatcher allegedly function just fine with less than five hours of sleep a night. That’s fine – they are freaks of nature who put their oddity to work for them. In the process, they set a high bar for those of us who walk around delirious with less than six hours at the pillow.
At 6:13 am, the car is out of the garage, the kid is at the pool, and I’m at a 24-hour Walgreen’s locking in my day’s carbonated caffeine so that I can get through the next 16 hours or so.
There is a line at the checkout. A lot of us are up and about.
As a reward, I witness a gorgeous sunrise over Lake Michigan, all eastern exposure and red streaks across the sky. It’s lovely, but is it consolation for lost sweet dreams?
I’ve had jobs that required early start times, dealt with a baby who would not sleep, and then signed that baby up for swimming. I’ve gone through long periods of time with chronic sleep deprivation, and long periods where I was able to get in eight or nine hours of sleep a night.
I don’t want to get up at 3:40 so that I can have an hour to work on my novel before taking on the day; or at 2:40 so that I can work on my novel and exercise; or at 1:40 so that I can work on my novel, exercise, and meditate. I’d prefer that the swimming coach hold practices after school so that I can get up at 8:00 am and do the things I want and need to do. But it’s not my choice!
And so, I get up, and I’m cranky. I dream of a society that accepts sleep as a natural, necessary part of life, not a distraction from then. Until then, I set the alarm and go.
