4am

Christmas is not a period of the year I particularly look forward to because I know it adds an extra day of work and creates longer days but this is called serving the market. My daughter and her husband are in the same boat, they have temporarily relocated to a town two hours drive away from where their live and rented a place, all to meet the demands of this time - this is the life bread of their particular family business - for the worker or the entrepreneur seasonal demand is what it is and those that sign up for work that involves this demand should not bemoan it.

This morning I decided that I shall awake at 4am - which has less to do with work and more to do with beBee. Whether this is a sustainable strategy remains to be seen, because I am the type who on seeing the alarm clock showing 4:00am instinctively hit the snooze button. Usually after about five to seven snoozes of 10 minute intervals, I have awoken my vigour sufficiently to drag myself out of bed. So I will see how it goes, but I also know that when people add an hour to their day, that hour will compete with all that can fill it - then what - because dicing with sleep is not a mature thing to do - if I choose to awaken at 4:00am it will not be due to sacrificing quality of sleep but knowing that I work fine on 6 hours - even if 8 hours is usually recommended. This is not about a workaholic mindset - but having the energy for purpose.

I hate the word "time management" because life is really about "meaning management". Time is a physical reality when it comes to energy used and restoration of that energy that comes through physical intelligence such as diet, sleep, meditation and flow. Time is also creative meaning and in that regard human beings can become quite extraordinary in the way they can adapt. The Apollo 13 film captures that spirit - but here meaning is literally life and death :

The film clip ends with the words "wicked shimmy" and in most cases we may adapt to circumstances because of a wicked shimmy. There is no wicked shimmy occurring that would need me to awaken at an unearthly hour, but there is enthusiasm and so long as enthusiasm is greater than the desire to get up - I say go with the flow, but not to make that an actual daily ritual. The moment that reality is untenable one can adjust to what is normal.

The biggest danger of adding time to one's clock is not what that hour is borrowed from, but how the transition happens to what you would have otherwise awoken for - which in my case namely is work. Even now I am conscious of the clock running on me due to the thing we underestimate the most, which is the preparation and travel time required. That is what one needs to get smart about, which is the unconscious points between activities and the calculations about time we make in our own head, which often prove to be more unrealistic than acts of imaginative flow.

If this 4am practice holds this week, it means that I can contribute like I have done this morning and moreover start my day with an alarm clock called beBee. The real test is when I wake up on Saturday because I am working on the weekend and whether that reality takes over, or if this reality I have designed in the present moment, still has legs. I would not be surprised if tomorrow the alarm goes off at 4am and I groan "no f....n way ....". Every human being needs time and space to be conscious and fully awake.

The actual discipline then is managing the transitions and not the process of awaking and even know I have entered that transition point - and so I must consciously ward off the temptation to add five minutes that contracts the time needed to flow into the next activity. Also it is these spaces between which buffer us from sinking into our rabbit hole and thus the life that I don't want to create which is one giant mother of an activity trap. Activity traps are unconscious moments when we get our little minds and feet on the wheel. If we retain our sense of humour about these things - we can make the necessary adjustments needed, that makes our life flow rather than become an activity trap.

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