Wake up — its dark.
Check the time — 4am.
Back to sleep.
Its getting light — 5am.

Its 6am and I’m checking stuff on my iPhone. My eyes are clear because I despatched the sandman an hour ago. I will be tired but am not feeling it now. Hello Monday.

My mind is at its best when I wake up. That’s when ideas spark and deep thoughts surface with little resistance. If only I could divide my waking time into parallel lines of meditation and productive action I’d have life cracked.

We double account our lives, bemoaning the time we wasted obsessing about one thing when we could have broadened our horizons; and marvelling at that guy who dedicated his life to a singular passion at the expense of a world of experiences.

If we’d spend less time worrying about misadventures, checking all the options and comparing our failures with others’ successes we’d live better lives — lives with warts and dimples, escstasies and doldrums, smiles and frowns.

Getting up is our commitment to living, where we admit there is something worth getting up for. Negotiation is pointless – it’s a done deal – it’s more about navigating the covert contracts and not obsessing over the small print. Accepting a 60% failure rate is the gateway to enjoying the other 40%.

This weird time is teaching me to seize the moment. We are not in the collision path of a giant asteroid or living though a nuclear winter but our mortal bones have become visible beneath our facile skin.

Its amazing how being deprived of one pleasure or sensation makes more vivid, that for which the edges were blurry. It forces us to analyse what we took for granted and decouple what we we thought were inseparable. Yet in the sterile vacuum where once was interpersonal space we also entertain strange ideas and invent personas we’d have dismissed ordinarily. We might look back with nostalgia to the days we learned social distancing, clapped for the carers and gave to the NHS, all without reference to true the cost of it.

Its been another day of meetings, discussions, decisions, dilemmas and unfniished business. Another day of planning ahead without a clear view of the landscape and coming to conclusions based on flimsy evidence. Boris is back — whatever the hell that means. Priti is not so much bright as a button as like a loose button — plastic and having lost the thread. No one knows what to do because the what to do is not at all clear. If only we’d been prepared and resourced it might have been clearer and simpler.

Anyway my future 4am is much closer now than my past one. I know I won’t be able to sleep through to a reasonable getting up time. Instead I will fill it up with stuff and the trade off will be feeling tired at 10pm.

There is no such thing as a 24 hour day and 16 hours of productivity is unsustainable. Not many of us will dedicate more than 10 hours to paid work. In reality the hours don’t matter because we discard most of them. What matter are the moments because its the significant moments that give meaning to our vacuous hours.