i’d like to think of myself as high-energy, with the caveat that it refers to both amplitude and frequency. my peaks include such feats as running a half-marathon on a whim (ah to the pandemic days when i ran on a regular), reading a hundred years of solitude till the very end (even though i simply did not get it) and walking 5km+ in Bangalore traffic to one-up the autos who were surcharging a pound of flesh and a half. such peaks tend to come at the cost of consistency where i often trough down to unproductive days when i don’t move the meters of life by much. getting away from the philosophical questions of whether life is really about meter moving, it’d be nice to have less of such days. how?
a seemingly constant factor in dictating which side of the line of frequency im on is the way i wake and particularly whether it occurs at will. in other words gorging on a snooze fest is a surefire way to be despondently flitting all over the place. a close friend once commented on the wonders of not setting an alarm and simply waking to the natural rhythm of the body in alignment with the cosmos, but this would lead me to waking at 11am despite sleeping at 10pm. one of my past lives may have been kumbhakarna (i just read the wikipedia page and i would like to take that back).
so an alarm i must keep but how to stop from rolling down the snoozing hill? i refuse to solve math problems the minute i wake and other ingenious tricks failed to bear fruit. what prompted me to write this was a funny little epiphany i had today - to not snooze you simply stop the alarm. that’s what i did today and woke minutes after. no longer was there an option to go back to sleep knowing i would be roused once again by the dreaded tune. to stop the alarm was to take over completely my conscious will to wake, to no longer have it obfuscated and sedated by off-loading the cognition to my phone. i stopped the inevitable spiral down the attractor basin laid down by past habit and found ground to plant my feet on.
this is the point where i expand and generalize beyond snoozing to shine light on the workings of reality and consciousness. but that’s for another day.