unmasked

Today is the first “chol” (Jewish term meaning “regular day” / weekday) that I have had in a very, very long time. And I have a lot of feelings and thoughts to dump about it. But before I do that, here is the new plan, after let’s just say, completely abandoning any notion of getting up at 5 AM since the last time I wrote here.

I am not going to make myself read that awful book. Once I figured out that this is a toxic individualism / exceptionalism book and not just a mere “wellness bro” book, my entire brain and body rebelled against my having to consume one more word of it. My visceral reaction is something I may write about more at some point—I’m sure this is Jungian—but regardless, I am absolutely not going to force myself to read, or even exist near, that book. In fact, as soon as I’m done with this post, I am going to go dump both of my copies in the Little Free Library at our playground. (Yes, the friend I accidentally sent my first copy to shipped it back to me! So now I have two.)

But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. There’s a reason I wanted to do something like this, so let’s … do something like this, even if the source material wasn’t suitable.

Through some sort of cliffnotes like thing that I don’t even remember how I came across, I figured out that the 5 AM club’s basic gist is to spend the 5-6 AM hour as follows:

• 20 minutes of “vigorous exercise”
• 20 minutes reflection (e.g. journaling, though I am not sure this blog would count, and I have sort of decided that meditation is required for me in some form).
• 20 minutes learning (I am tentatively thinking Torah study here, as it seems a convenient opportunity to take on that “fixed times for Torah study” mitzvah)

I don’t actually care about the extent to which this came from the book or not. It is concrete enough and open enough to give me some good material to experiment with, as long as I I can find a way to do it without being filled with constant rage at the fact that I named my blog after a book that represents everything I despise about the modern universe (and I don’t think I can actually rename it.)

So, this is my revised proposal:

(1) “Get up in time to spend the first hour of my day doing those 3 things club.”

(2) In a gesture of rebellion, my alarm will never be set or exactly 5:00 AM. Maybe 5:02 or something.

(3) I will start this experiment on “Fall back” day, which is a week from now. In hindsight, in my rules blog, I actually began the blog a week before the experiment started, and I think that warmup period was pretty important.

Known blockers: Donald Trump getting elected president during the first week of my experiment. After that happened in 2016, I definitely spent the next two days in bed and apoplectic. OK. Off to dispose of the copy of 5 AM Club that I can see right now. I’m not going to pressure myself to find the other one right now (I had a panic attack over the clutter in my house this morning, a topic for another time).