On waking up

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My Saturday morning was a mild mayhem because I disobeyed the alarm clock. 

I am always optimistic with my alarm, allowing me at least one snooze. Usually that action gets the phone in my hand and the combination of email and facebook notifications do the rest. But this Saturday, as my watch told me later, I had this very deep sleep just in time for me miss the pathetic everyday sequence altogether.

This, on a day I promised myself a fresh start: A formal beginning of the post-pandemic life when I should switch from forever waiting and compromising to getting on with my ideas in a hurry. This perhaps was the deep sleep as I was dreaming I have got there already. Therefore, I woke up with a start and started as I woke up. 

But - if I could get back my faith in omens - this disregarding the alarm was a good sign. I was raised on a certain ethic - getting up early is good, slumbering around is bad - but the very thing that I want to do now, raise my awareness about the underlying structures of our lives, tells me that this is where my servitude starts. The alarm clock, in more than one way, is the first symbol of capitalism I encounter every day. Unless I count some of the dreams, or that I call the fantastic ideas that arise in deep sleep dreams, as markers of capitalism too.

Pandemic made me lose my job and get new ones not once, but a couple of times. I lived through a few tense months of trying to find opportunities just as the commercial world seemed to be heading to a meltdown and then experiencing just the opposite - the sweet feeling of being in great demand! In a way, these months shone a light on the precarity of my existence and the pointlessness of all the success. It's a good thing in the end, as I have lost all ability to take myself seriously. 

This is the roadblock in my path back to normality. My well-earned lack of seriousness means that I can't take anything as permanent - and therefore can't plan for the future. But this is precisely what I am trying to do at this very moment - move beyond the pandemic! One change that I see around me exactly this: The pretences that ruled our lives in 2019 have fallen away. I am not saying pretencion is gone - that would mean the end of civilisation - but everyone now seem to know how precarious everything is and the claims to know the future are taken with a pinch of salt. In context, I am not doing too badly.

Back of alarm clock, then! It made me think of the possibility of no alarm clocks at all. This must be part of my future plans: I can't yet put a date on it but this must be part of my plan. When I live the life I want to live, the tyranny of the alarm clock must end. The thought fills me with dread - there will be no structure of the day, I think - but I know that the alternate is not slumbering on bed, but to wake with the sun. This has happened for centuries for most of the humanity, until electric lights and factories changed our day and how we live. My not taking myself seriously is the first step of my escape plan; going back to the alarm clock-free cycles will be perhaps its final stop. When I ditch it, I shall perhaps fully wake up.



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