Zerebria

He had mastered the technique of rising early, but was nevertheless having a hard time staying risen. What for? Making his way through mornings was toilsome and useless. Somehow, all things that counted always seemed to happen in the afternoon. But he did not like the sensation of wasting half of the day in exchange for waking up energized. The problem was he liked nights too, they were the quieter moment of the day and silly people stopped bothering. He wanted the best of both worlds, but it looked like the only way to achieve that would be moving to some planet where the day had 32 hours instead of only 24.

Then one day he had this crazy idea. He was eating something that only etymologically could be called ‘breakfast’ (because it broke sleep’s obliged fast), and in quite a perplexed and uncomfortable mood as usual in those occasions, when he suddenly thought about it: the world outside was obviously mistaken in a tremendous amount of things. Could not be the hour simply one more of those mistakes? What prevented him from deciding that right then it was really early if he decreed so?

So he decided to try the experiment. He put his clock back to 5 am and felt immediately relieved. Wow, a brand new day all for him! It was so great waking up early and yet so focused and alert! Hi hid the other clocks in the house, and configured his computer so that the hour was not easy to see.

To reinforce the illusion, he then lowered again the blinds he had just raised after waking up (the light outside was ‘slightly’ more intense than what is usual at 5 am). He then eagerly proceeded to write down his daily plan. As a freelance knowledge worker, he found that he had an intense freedom to rearrange things without colliding with the outside world. Of course there were exceptions, phone calls that had to be done during office time, a vacuum cleaner whose noise would not be welcome after ‘their’ 9 pm, etc. They all were easily identified and managed.

It was barely ‘his’ 6:30 am when he dived into his work. Diving is the right expression because he immediately entered a state of flow as he had not felt in years, decades maybe. The street outside was very quiet, or he did not feel the noises because he had so much energy. Time had a peculiar quality, some sort of slow density, that he only had felt in his childhood. He savored every second and yet, he was a machine of doing things. At 1 pm, he went to the kitchen to prepare some lunch, lighting some lamps on his way in order to replicate solar light as accurately as possible. He even dared to have a siesta later. He woke up before the alarm clock rang, feeling newly energized for a second round.

He hardly thought about ‘their’ hour anymore. What for? His eyes winked now and then with something like a flash of fatigue, intense and yet brief, like a lash, but otherwise he felt incredibly strong and concentrated. That day he went to bed early for his standards, round ‘his’ 11 pm (outside the dawn was covering surfaces with the first gray, ash-like light), leaving behind an amazing amount of workload managed.

The first thing he did when he woke up, in full confusion, was looking at his watch. Then he smiled, thinking that his hunch had been confirmed: it was the world who was wrong. Switching to the new schedule, he had managed to sleep only 6 hours and yet he felt fully aware and ready to rumble again. He jumped out of the bed like a tiger.

Nobody noticed the difference, and it worked so well that he kept on doing it for several days. It wasn’t that crazy at all, when one thought about it: don’t industrial societies do the same thing twice a year to fulfill their interests? And besides, very often, it was those who preached the need of rising early, the same who had managed to make mornings absolutely uninhabitable.

He was happy of mastering time like that. Maybe the euphoria of the first days was not present anymore, but his schedule continued being more effective by far than the regular one. He completely quit using the alarm clock. What for? A slight manipulation in the watch assured that he was always waking up at 5 am. It was wonderful. He acquired the habit of checking out in internet where his hour belonged to. There was always a place in the world where it was his time, and it was always funny to find out that he was having a Thai day, an Australian, a Canadian day. Whatever.

It all worked very well except for one thing: the hours of human activity are not decided by a social agreement, but imposed by biological patterns. Left to its own means, without any additional intervention, human body naturally tends to return to the solar-lunar rhythms.

One night he was having dinner at ‘his’ 9 pm, when his eyelids started to fall. He felt surprised; he had planned activities until ‘his’ 11 pm, as usual. He told himself that it was one of those momentary flashes of fatigue that he had now and then. But even then he knew that it wasn’t true; that one felt different. He barely finished his dinner: his eyelids were leaded, his whole body soon flooded with an intense sensation of cold, a cold that felt like generated from within the body, and against which additional clothes were of no use. To-do lists had no meaning anymore: all of a sudden, each and everyone of his cells was a cry asking for rest. “Death must feel like this”, he said to himself as he plunged into the bed, with his clothes on. Then he was gone.

Related posts:

Productivity the Spartan way
Entering the flow
There’s nothing wrong with being a freak
The 15 seconds sneaking
Is the Internet a lonely place?

November 9, 2010 at 9:11 pm by Nacho Jordi
Tags: Adaptation, Computers, Difference, Experiments, Focus, Habits, Learning, Motivation, Personal productivity, Sleep, Social conditioning, Stories, Transcendence