Reveille

One of the ways to keep a car running healthy, especially when it’s older, is to be gentle with it in the morning. Revving the engine soon after you start the ignition, quick starts and stops, and forcing the car into higher gears before it’s warmed up is a surefire way to shorten its life.

On some mornings, I make the mistake of checking my e-mails soon after waking up, even though I know it will contain at least fifty marketing solicitations, another fifty pornographic advertisements, another fifty pharmaceutical advertisements for products that are directly related to the pornographic advertisements, and about a dozen “as soon as possible” work requests.

If I’m lucky, I will get a handful of e-mails from friends and family that talk about what they’re currently doing in life, that has nothing to do with politics, the current war, or e-mails that I have to pass on to ten other people if I am to guarantee that I will have a nice day. Out of two hundred e-mails, I will sift through and read my cousin’s recipe for egg roll first.

Something I noticed about my reading work related e-mails first thing in the morning, before all my senses and balance have kicked in: the work requests seem as if they’re much more important than they really are. If I first take the time to go to the bathroom, walk around my bedroom, open the drapes to let sunshine in and listen to the birds outside, drink a little water to get my fluid lines going, if I first do these things, it seems as if the work related e-mails, although they are necessary for my livelihood, aren’t so immediate, important. Which reminds me of something Charles Bukowski said:

How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?

When I was younger, I thought that in order to be a “good person”, one was supposed to do the above things, suffer the requisite suffering, and live in a certain degree of ignorance and denial, enough to be able to get the day’s job done. I thought that stressfulness was next to godliness.

I recently read this from C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, with the demon uncle giving advice to his demon nephew. Here, as in the rest of the book, “The Enemy” is God:

Never having been a human, you don’t realise how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary. I once had a patient, a sound atheist, who used to read in the British Museum. One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment. Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years’ work beginning to totter. If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defence by argument I should have been undone. But I was not such a fool. I struck instantly at the part of the man which I had best under my control and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch…Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man’s head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of ‘real life’ (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all ‘that sort of thing’ just couldn’t be true. He knew he’s had a narrow escape and in later years was fond of talking about ‘that inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere logic’. He is now safe in Our Father’s house (Hell).

and this:

We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow’s end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.

C.S. Lewis has an interesting take on the Past, Present, and Future. Here’s a snippet:

In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time—for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays…Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

Memo to myself to research this further.

It took me about two hours to write this entry. In between the writing, my cat wanted to play, I did two loads of laundry, and talked with a couple friends on the phone about life. When my friend Brad answered his work phone, I sang my first two sentences to him, guessing that he was probably in meetings all day and probably had not heard one musical note since he stepped inside the building. I also wrote down some African poetry and proverbs that I found on some web sites, to use on a future pro-bono project. Here’s one, a proverb from the Fulani tribe:

“Patience can cook a stone.”

I will now do some real-world, paying work, sifting through written notes and e-mails to find the proper requests, file attachments, double requests, ASAP requests, making sure that everything is properly documented, double checked and prioritized, because these are very very very important things, you know.

But first, lunch.