After a 2-week holiday, much of which was at home alone, I’m back teaching kindergarten with 60-odd little kids running around me.
The time I spent resting was not passive. I was actively writing, stretching & exercising, and relaxing.
It made me re-think what my perfect day would look like.
Without a job, my mind & actions don’t operate day-by-day.
It’s more moment-to-moment.
The idea of sleeping at the same time each night and waking up at the same time each morning, is not natural.
For me, creativity and productivity comes from open-time.
This does not mean foolishly believing we have unlimited time.
But the idea of fitting what we need to do into tomorrow’s schedule becomes obsolete.
It means being able to focus on what’s in front of us, now.
If there is a task to complete, whether it’s 11pm or 4am is irrelevant.
Of course, in my two-week holiday if I was tired, for example, I slept. But sometimes I only slept 2-4 hours.
With a task to complete and no place to be the next day, I woke up with energy & clarity, and continued with my task.
The idea what you are doing could be the last thing you ever do injects an aliveness into everything.
But now I’m back at work.
And when you have some place to be every day, a regular schedule is necessary.
So if I must impose a schedule on myself, I figure I might as well go to the extreme of an early-riser.
This lets me recreate that open-time feeling in small blocks.
Within this framework, I am setting up my perfect day.
I’m doing it, though, with the intent of being free from that framework, eventually.
In this way, I am tricking my mind into believing this might be the last thing I ever do.
