How I became an early bird through philosophy
Today I woke up 10 minutes before my alarm. That’s how it starts. When you are willing to get out of the bed even before the already early intended time, at 5 am.
When I was younger I loved pulling all-nighters as much as the next person and sometimes would even work all night in good company. I loved that sensation of being drowsy and a little off while everyone else was up to get on with their day. I sort of envied their willpower and the effort put into it but never really understood. Until now, that is.
Not too many years down the road and I made my way into the second group. I read this book — don’t worry, it’s not self-help or anything weird — that really changed my perception. That, and therapy, of course. The book I stumbled upon is about a certain philosophy that I had heard about many times before and always thought too harsh and dull to follow. But, as a good-old bookworm I decided to give it a try. I have read some philosophy books in my day, but this one was different. It wasn’t written by an actual philosopher, but an Emperor. Marcus Aurelius, to be more precise.
Marcus Aurelius was considered the last good Emperor of Rome. He applied new rules to reduce the sheer violence in combats in the roman circus, lowered tributes and acquitted debt for the poor and garanteed through the State the instruction of women. Instead of thinking from the comfort of his chair he embodied Stoic philosophy and practiced it every day the best he could. He wrote this book about it that was never intended as a book. He kept it as a journal. And there he’d scribble some thoughts aphorisms and harsh truths about life and death.
As a journal writer myself, I identified with him and being comfronted with death all around us during the pandemic, I was also trying to find my own answer to all of this, the existence, the why and the how and I stopped because I finally noticed something. No matter how hard you try, you’ll never get it, because there is no ultimate answer. Some people prefer comforting words and beliefs of afterlife, but that’s all that they are: beliefs.
Rather, I decided to stare at the abyss of death, an end in itself, and tried really hard to find peace with it. I did, eventually. We all have an expiration date, some die young, some old, others somewhere in between, but we all cease to exist. Forgetting could be interpreted as the death of memory. And even that emperor who we can read about in History books said we will all be forgotten, and even history itself will one day be forgotten too, and the planet that we stand on, and the solar system and so on.
When I finally understood this about the end I figured something new about life. Life is effort, it is the struggle, doing the hard things, the ones that are worth our short time here on Earth. I like this metaphor of physics: Nothing in the universe stands still. Everything is in motion, even the tiniest particles! The universe tends to Chaos and destruction, and energy must be spent to counteract it. A bit like a contract: to exist, one must spend energy. Things break, get muddy, stained, filthy, shattered into pieces… We are here to repair them and in doing so, repair ourselves on the long road of self-improvement, fast or slow, regardless of personal beliefs in a god or two or none at all.
So, now I am one of those who wake up early and while riding a bike towards the sun I watch those all-nighters drowsily walking back to the comfort of their home. To each his own, but I prefer to seek discomfort and constant motion until the day the sun sets one last time.
