I have been a night owl all my life. Waking up early is not my thing. I worship people who are up and about in the wee hours of the morning and wonder what magic spell turns their battery on at dawn. A full bladder or an early morning flight are the only triggers that can force me from horizontality to verticality, at these God forsaken hours (Brahma muhurtham, as it is called!) Even these awakenings are transitory, as I go back under the blankets at the immediate possible opportunity.
Sleep patterns are set in childhood. If we have conditioned our body to awake and arise before the rooster, it will follow us until death. The habit I mean, not the rooster. So, essentially it is our parents who are the custodians of our circadian rhythm. They decide early on, if our body clock needs to run clock wise or anti clock wise. And leave us ticking, on to the world, for the rest of our lives. It gets all the more complicated when one of the parents is an early bird (who may or may not get the worm, and that’s not the point) and the other is a stubborn night owl, and one doesn’t get to choose whose blasted gene one will inherit. Nor do we have any control over the parent’s preference for creating an archetype or a clone. Given these circumstances, I decided to work on the forces that were in my control. No, not my bladder, but my brain.
I spent days, rather nights, reading James Clear’s “Atomic Habits” and Robin Sharma’s “The 5am club”, for the much needed inspiration and impetus. Great books, undoubtedly! Motivational, hell yes! But, they don’t address the fundamental problem; of snoozing the alarm, when it startles you in the middle of deep slumber, while you are busy snow gazing in Switzerland, snorkeling in Andaman or sun bathing in San Diego. Early morning sleeps are the soundest and the deepest. When the brain is in such deep sedation, how does one invoke the act of thinking, let alone rational thinking, to send fine grained signals to the hand and stop it from snoozing the blaring alarm the millionth time? An atomic bomb might be able to achieve this outcome, but how can “Atomic Habits” help? Chapters from the “5am club” are the last things to pop up in the mind, when one is up in the sky, in a hot air balloon, over the mighty hills of Cappadocia, salivating quite literally and liberally on the pillow, where the dreamy head is propped. Dreams take flight, they say. Or one takes flights in dreams to escape the alarm!
Purists tell me that, the peace and quiet of early mornings are magical moments that one must surrender to, to lead a soulful life. I want to ask them, if they have ever experienced the calmness that surrounds the self, when the soul is in deep slumber, making rhythmic sounds through the nostrils (or the mouth, if you please) in the twilight hours. “Rest in peace”, they say, not “Arise and jump around in peace”! The other solemn question that prods the intellectual mind is, what does one do after waking up pre-morning, in that half baked state? My brain typically needs two hours to warm up to the world and start functioning normally, after I wake up. So, what on earth do I do with myself when my brain is not with me? If you are part of a household where everyone else is engrossed in a sleep contest till 8am, why would you want to break the rules and render yourself perpendicular?
The “5am club” also does not guide us on the course of action to be undertaken, when one wakes up at wee hours with half closed eyes and spots a cockroach moving gleefully, in close proximity, oblivious of our New Year resolution! Leaping up in the air, with the heart in mouth, and screaming one’s lungs out, is the only reaction I can contemplate, under these circumstances. Performing such acrobatics and vocal exertions at 5am and waking up the entire household plus the neighborhood does not seem a pleasant proposition. And this is also not the time to analyze and argue why the cockroach is trying to be a night owl. People like Robin Sharma should consider writing animal friendly copies — “The Cockroach club: Own your morning, Elevate your life”, “The mosquito who sold his sleep”, “Who will cry when roaches die?”
Once, I tried the terrific technique of keeping the alarm device yards away from the span of control of my hands, before going to bed. This caused great commotion in the house, waking up many hands and heads, other than mine. I was also advised to insure my hands, in case someone tries to chew them off, during the course of the early morning treasure hunt that I had arranged. The world wide web revealed that, there are fancy alarms that threw a mathematical problem at us and wouldn’t stop ringing until the problem was successfully solved. Awakening and instigating the brain to an extent that it wouldn’t possibly go back to sleep, is the idea here. However, the very thought of algebra at dawn and the shadow of my math teacher at school, looming large in front of me, made me abandon this approach. The method to madness can never be mathematics, I proclaimed!
Following the sound advice of mentors and well wishers, I also tried sleeping early, unwinding my senses by 9pm, switching off all gadgets, shutting down the stream of thoughts, playing soothing music and taking deep breaths. The collective effect of all these rituals dragged me into slumber land, only to spring me out of sleep a few hours later. I sat up the whole night reading about somnambulism and scrolling through the infinite posts and reels on my sleepless screens. “Early to bed, early to rise”, is a known slogan. But, I didn’t expect it to be this early!
Having exhausted all humanly possible options, I felt it was time to turn to the supreme force, the almighty! I considered this brilliant idea of approaching a certain Swamiji, with a request to modify the sun’s movements to suit my body clock. He could delay the sun’s onset by a few hours, so that I could sleep extra hours and still earn the title of a lark/early bird! I am awaiting my visa, to visit the holy abode of Swamiji and turn my dreams to reality!
This story is inspired by the 100 day storytelling initiative by Your Story Bag. This is my story for day 24/100 of #2023TheStoriedWay
