One of the things I like about this waking up early experiment is the sensation of not being late.
I was born late. The doctor pronounced that I should be born in the first days of September, and by my parents’ circle of friends’ accounts be the first of three babies to be born in the group. But I didn’t. There was nothing wrong with the process; I just did not want to get out of the warm into the harsh realities of this world. So my mom waited, and waited, and waited until I decided to come out two to three weeks later than expected. I’ve been late since. Late for my schedule and everybody else’s. Actually being late is one of the few things I’ve gotten in trouble with during school (with teachers) and work (with bosses). Recently it’s also the main reason for getting my now wife upset with me.
Why am I late? I don’t exactly know, but it seems to be a mix of having no sense of time and wanting to finish whatever I am doing. The having no sense of time (“urgency” as my wife calls it), has been reflected at me by her. In the very beginning of our relationship she would get super upset with me when I was late (she’s the opposite by the way), but then she realised, with a few probing questions that I don’t know any better. Ask me how long X has been happening, and I won’t have a clue whether it was 5 minutes or 50. I don’t exactly know why that is, it could be genetics (see the post about waking up early), or it could be that I don’t care for Time. I see time as the ultimate god of today’s world. In a world where political ideology is dead, and religions are mostly withering, the one thing that everyone seems to respect is time (“time stops for no one”). And that bothers me because if in reality we are bound by it, nobody seems to put so much weight into space, which we’ve conquered in a small scale by travelling easily and quickly over the majority of our planet, but I hear no one honouring and saving space like they do time. And, assuming the theory of relativity is correct, seeing time as a one-dimensional thing is silly as well. My other trait which contributes to my constant delays of tasks, and even life (I married relatively late for my cohort, bought a house even later, for example) is perfectionism. I take a lot of time to get started with a task, let’s call it my warm-up period. Getting all context is very important for me, so instead of just doing something, I like to understand what it is I’m doing and only afterwards do it. The opposite end of the ladder is that I am in full swing when I am supposed to stop doing whatever I’m doing for the next task. One easy example is this post, which was so hard to get started, but is now flowing at a time when our dog is eagerly waiting to be taken outside for his morning walk. So waking up early and catching the sunrise gives me some sense of achievement. Of being ahead of the game for once and that I can “take my time” to do things on my rhythm because I made an effort to start early. What about you?