Don't Go Back to Sleep

This morning I rose early to write and prepare for the day. The alarm was set for 4 a.m., which sounds mostly terrible, but not unusual for me, and I treat these silent hours after waking as precious. I build in time to hit the snooze button in the same way I’ve built in a time for my horribly predictable sense of direction by padding my leave time for someplace new—let’s just accept I’ll get lost. It’s better with GPS, but not much, since I argue with that little digital voice on the regular.

I once wrote a poem called Self-Portrait filled with moons. Moons from all over the world and all over my life. Moons calling to me, marking me, inspiring me. This morning, hitting that tiny button, snuggling back into the down pillows, the November moon shone through the slats of the west-facing window shutters. They say blue eyes are more sensitive to light, but no eyes could resist this reminder: get up. Get up. Don’t go back to sleep. Thoreau said, “to be awake is to be alive,” in Walden, and I’ve always known he was right.

A few weeks ago, I visited a traditional English manor house outside Oxfordshire and spent four days with thought leaders from around the world at a Gathering for Good. The host gave us a very comprehensive yearly planner that he enjoys using. There were provocative journaling questions and goal setting exercises, places to list habits to which you’d like more commitment, tiny stickers that celebrated days off or affirmations. There were no actual numbers, so you could customize it at any time.

I love a good planner, a paper calendar, and a way to create beautiful order in my life. I love a good list! It’s also true that I’ve had many a planner before and rarely have I kept up with the tracking goals for an entire year. I’m wistful about the paper calendar, for sure, in a complicated relationship with my Outlook App, and I did stick with a Bullet Journal for a few years, but mostly, carrying around all those goals all the time feels heavy and somewhat burdensome.

But Chris gave us the planners with grand intention, I’m sure—that whatever good in the world we set out to foster, if we mapped it out there might be a confluence of dreaming for better and actually getting it done.

Once, I got to meet Margaret Wheatley, author of Leadership and the New Science and Perseverance. She shared a story about meeting the Dalai Llama once, along with a group of activists who had devoted their lives to some of the world’s biggest issues: environmental conservation, human trafficking, eradicating disease, fighting poverty, workers’ rights. The activists were tired, exhausted from holding their problem-solving mission and dreams for thirty or forty years only to feel like they’d move forward and back, forward and back recognizing the same patterns and conversations for years. They felt on the verge of losing hope. They shared their despair with the eminent spiritual leader: are we making any difference at all? He paused to take it all in (because every wise person pauses) and said, “of course you are making a difference. But we may not see it for 700 years.”

Unlike my colleagues in the room with me that day, I did not find this depressing at all. In fact, some days, that’s all I need to know to keep at it. To stay alive. To keep showing up. To imagine something that I might do could have some positive ripple some many years hence. I should stop writing right now. That’s an inspiring ending, right? To close the journal and move on with my day, updating my planning, marking off my tiny goals.

Except something different about this planner was a facing page spread that asked me to imagine my future one year from now. Then a column for five years, and so on, up to twenty-five. And under each year, there was a space for how old I’d be at that time. And there it was—in print—that my time on this earth, in this life, is not infinite, despite any persistent notion that my life will go on and on. That someday should be the measure of when.

How many years left will I imagine that I have with my beloveds? What makes me put off living the life I imagine right now? How many more November moons shining perfectly to wake me again, to remind me to “live deep and suck the marrow out of life”?

Not that many, so I might as well get on with it today.

Photo by @Phil Symchych.