I have a long-seated loathing for waking up early, one that surpasses the joy and anticipation of so many Easter and Christmas mornings spent rollicking around the house in pajamas and slipper-socks. It comes from a string of long-journeys, usually involving some considerable amount of physical discomfort and fitful sleep.
When I was fifteen I had major surgery on my chest to correct a genetically-inherited disorder known as pectus excavatum. My sterum has always grown in a cork-screw inward direction, and my ribs and breastplate are dislocated, placing an unnatural amount of pressure on my internal organs. Aside from the cosmetic effects of an asymmetic and under-developed torso, long term side-effects include increased stress on the heart and lungs. Upshot is I had extensive corrective surgery where my sterum was broken and chest bones repositioned. At fifteen, I wasn’t looking forward to my first hospital visit since birth. We left at roughly four in the morning after a sleepless night for a long morning of pre-op in Baltimore.
I used to hate flying. Loathed it. I think that grew out of getting airsick in flying to the Ozarks for my great-grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary when I was six. How small my world was back then, never being more than a couple hours’ drive away from home. I insisted that somehow I would survive college and my career with my trips to the airports few and far between. Ha. As Counselor Troi says “the best way out is through.” After my rise to computer science department student representative at Virginia, I found myself accelerating into an explosive suite of paid flights for interviews, contests and appearances, the dot-com age of recruiting was still in full-force at the end of the 90s, and I was virtually required to be jet-setting on its coattails. I travelled twelve thousand miles in three months after previously rarely venturing any father than two states. Already I marvel at how boastfully accomplished the traveler I thought I was then, where now routinely crossing the Pacific three times a year. Still, at the dawn of my era of enlightenment, fatigue and a mild sense of dread were the prerequisites for those morning rides to Dulles or BWI in my father’s stoic, smoke-filled sedan.
So many pre-dawn rousings for the fraternity did little to improve my sentiment for my grandfather’s adage of “early to bed, early to rise…“. Everytime I awoke to the cold darkness it was matted hair, track pants and eyes glued shut with sleep while Brandon waited with a sports drink bottle of water in the pitch den. We walked in silence, the only sounds the swishing of nylon against nylon, fingers cupped under arms as the we waited the long, hard minutes for the Neon’s diminutive heater to provide yet another bitter reminder of how blissful the sleep we were sacrificing was. Someone would be late. Someone else would be late. Someone would go to call the first person from Small Hall (cell phones were not yet practical). The first person would arrive in supposed ignorance of the planned meeting time. We’d wait for the person who went to call to come back. Someone would go after them. We’d give up on someone and mutter about how many dozens of pledge tasks would be piled upon the woeful class for such insubordination. The roll would meet with mixed results. Some of us would go back to bed for a late class, some would give up and sleep through it. Some would go to O’Hill and be the first at the omelet bar.
I want to change the seemingly insoluble abhorrence I have for waking up early. In a perfect world I’d display the lunar efficiency of my father and have three hours of work done in blissful solitude before anyone else even showed up at the office. Then I could leave at the end of the “working hours” posted on my contract at 6:30 and share a normal life with the millions of 20-something office workers, teachers, and shopkeepers.
The Dalai Lama says change in five steps: education, conviction, determination, action, effort; the last of which requires consistent application for a substantial period of time. He wakes up at 3:30 to start the day. I guess the least I could shoot for is 7. I wonder not what tomorrow’s attempt will bring, but the average for the next three weeks.
