I wrote yesterday about the lynchpin of my upcoming Big Year: springing out of bed before the dawn.
In my 20s, 30 and even 40s, living the corporate life, I could party and still get up in the pitch black for a jog. For no good reason that I can fathom, I can’t readily do that any more. Friends will say this is inevitable biophysical decay (“getting older, dude”) but I don’t believe that. It’s also the rage right now to cite research encouraging longer sleep – the hip idea is that brain processing is suboptimal otherwise – but again, the research base for that notion is pretty slim. No, older people doze on because they’ve trained themselves to be lazy.
In any case, I’m struggling with early starts and in 2017 won’t accept that. So . . . another key obsession for the 2017 Writing Big Year is to protect tomorrow’s dawn by not fucking up tonight. Make it simple, Andres – go to bed early, say no to midnight parties, cut out the over drinking . . . in other words, act old to be bold!
Going to sleep early in a peaceful state of mind is rather selfish, I know. It goes against the cultural habit of nighttime “relaxation,” which I genuinely enjoy. So 2017 will be tough – who knows if I can be rudely self-centered enough to put tomorrow’s solo pre-dawn efforts ahead of my family and friends. Who knows indeed?