MAY 24, WEDNESDAY

GETTING OUT OF BED

I have often wondered what inner unconscious drive gets me out of bed in the morning. I started wondering about this when I was in college and had a room to myself because my roommate had been sent home for writing checks to himself in my checkbook. So there was no one around when on a Saturday mornings I lay in bed wondering what was going to get me up to start my day. I don’t know why I wondered that. It seemed a pointless question with no one around to help me. I wasn’t going to let anyone else know what I was lying in bed waiting for. Of course, I had to get up eventually, to eat, to go for a walk, to meet someone, to do homework, to earn some money. Everyone knows you have to get up and start the day.

But still I wondered why. I could lie there and nothing would happen to me. I could lie there until mid afternoon until I got hungry or bored.

But I don’t think that getting up was really my question. My question was not what practical activity would force me up, the question was what inside me, then or now, would stir me in such a way that I really, really wanted to get up because something inside of me wanted to come fully to life.

In those days I had to eat, had to do homework, sometimes had to connect with friends, had to clean up my room and make my bed. There was always something all day long that I had to do. My days were filled, there was always more to do than I could get done from morning till late at night when I fell in bed exhausted.

But when I asked myself what I wanted to do that would cause me to jump out of bed and clear the deck of practical things and devote myself to doing because doing that activity filled me with delight or made me feel fully alive I was asking a different question. At that point it seemed to make more sense to put off the things that I was required to do or expected to do or felt guilty for not doing and to wait for that inner visceral drive to drive me to do something that really mattered, would enliven me and catapault me from bed. It almost never happened. So I would give up and do the things that I was expected to do or required to do or felt guilty for not doing.

But the question persisted. And when later in life I did find things that I really delighted in doing, that I couldn’t help doing, that I would put aside required things in order to do them, I partially found an answer. I would do what made me walk on tiptoe, dance with delight, things that filled me with energy and response. It was worth the wait and not giving up.

But the problem was that what I delighted in doing was not what I would get paid to do or was expected to do or felt guilty for not doing. One solution was to find a job which would pay me well for doing the things that I delighted in doing. People who get a great kick out of playing the stock market or building a business or inventing something and patenting it and becoming rich get rewarded for doing something that they really like doing. Ideally all jobs would be like that. Teachers enjoy teaching, preachers enjoy preaching, doctors enjoy healing, gifted baseball players get paid for playing baseball.

But for a huge number of people their profession, while often pleasant enough, or at least tolerable, doesn’t make them feel fully alive and for a great, great number of people on earth work is tedious even if well paid and what the person most enjoys doing, really wants to do, can only be done on weekends or after work when you come home exhausted. Work is a way to make money so that you can do something else on the weekend or during vacations. But if you are a mother with two kids, evenings and weekends are taken up with mothering and when finally freed in the evening you are too tired to do what you want to do, and the same is true for many fathers.

The question I had when twenty still holds. What is it that makes me feel fully alive and gets me out of bed with enthusiasm in the morning. Of course, now I am retired and presumably I can fill every day with just what I want to do. But if I’ve put off what I want to do for 60 years it is a little hard now to get started.

What I want, what everyone wants, is to spend my whole live rising early in the morning to do something that makes me feel fully alive all day long.