3 AM

Running out of time for tiny shifts

I woke at 3 AM. Today I am going to Florence for four days, and I don’t want to sleep through my time there.

When you visit somewhere as a young person, you imagine that you’ll be back many times. When you visit as an older person, you know that you may never see this place again. Or if you do, you might have to experience it in a completely different way.

My plan is to be tired enough to fall asleep immediately when I board the plane tonight at 7:00 PM, but I fear I will be tired enough that I’ll really just fall asleep some time during the day when I can’t function any more.

These hacks, these dramatic shifts - do they ever really work?

Is it possible to shift the body six hours by waking up early one day? Or must we do it gradually?

Some people would say that the dramatic approach is the right one. My son insists on staying awake the whole first day we travel abroad - no naps, immediately jumping into the schedule of the place he’s going.

He’s not wrong. It works to make yourself blackout tired, but it works because you make yourself miserable, too.

I find that I am much more of an incrementalist. Work, exercise, relationships, overcoming jet lag. A tiny shift makes most sense to me. A tiny shift every day has the same effect without the misery.

But tiny shifts are hard, too. We have to look into the future and imagine a reality that doesn’t exist and toward which we are moving very, very slowly. I imagined waking a little bit earlier every day this week, but on the heels of vacation, it didn’t happen.

And so, here I am. 4:46 AM. Three cups of coffee later. Already tired. Already trying to remember what I’m supposed to be doing to fill the next 14 hours.

(Photo by Logan Weaver for Unsplash)