Making Use of Twenty-Three Minutes at 5AM

Whether or not you subscribe to the specific cleansing attempts of New Years Resolutions, the start of a new year tends to bring with it a fresh attempt at leading the organised, productive and healthy life for which we all pretend to actively strive. We may not write a list or even mentally outline the specifics, but we do tend to get a renewed hope that maybe this January it will finally be different. I acknowledge that the 1st of January is simply another day, and that the separation of one year from another is really very arbitrary. Yet I still couldn’t help but spend a few minutes of my December 31st writing down some things that I achieved last year and some goals that I hope to at least think about pursuing in 2018.

Fast forward a little, and it is somehow now February. The first month of the year somehow came and went without me signing up for the kickboxing class, establishing any kind of routine, let alone good one, or writing any new poetry or lyrics. I didn’t even manage to sit myself down for half an hour to write a new blog post, and it hasn’t been for lack of time. So here I am, on the 4th of February, writing my first blog post for the year.

It has just turned 5am. I have been awake all night, partly due to a deliberately timed late coffee that allowed me to write the comedy sketch I needed to have done by today. Also partly due to my brain’s refusal to stop going over all of the things that I need to get done before I go to class tomorrow morning. I have decided to sit down (or up, really) and write because I was bored from lying in the dark and trying to sleep. I have decided to make use of the fact that I am still wide awake at 5am.

The last month has not seen me achieve the kind of routine that I was hoping to put in place. And now, I have come into a period of time where everything has started up again and I am trying to find the time to get everything done. I’m pretty sure I have just described the never-ending cycle in the life of every person I know. It is pretty difficult to leap straight from complete chaos to well-functioning routine. I also know just how far off of a good routine I am. I do think though that something I can do more, that I daresay many of us could do more, is try to flip around the pockets of free time that seem inconveniently small or timed or in-the-middle-of-the-night, and try to just make the most of them.

I am frequently writing-off some of my pockets of free time because they are only, for example, twenty-three minutes, and how much can I really get done in twenty-three minutes? I can’t write a complete sketch in twenty-three minutes. I can’t do a half-hour yoga session in twenty-three minutes. I can’t cook and eat a meal that takes half an hour to cook in twenty-three minutes. I can though, conveniently, watch a twenty-three-minute episode of a twenty-three-minute comedy show in twenty-three minutes. I guess then that’s just how I’ll have to use that time.

Or. Damn it, of course there’s an or. I could sit down and put twenty-three minutes towards coming up with a sketch idea. Or I could spend twenty-three minutes reading through the lines that I have to learn. Or I could concentrate for twenty-three minutes on booking some of the appointments that I need to book and paying some of the bills I need to pay. I can make use of that twenty-three minutes. I can make use of being awake at 5am.

So, here is my first blog post for the year, at 5am. I just wrote it in exactly twenty-three minutes.

Would you look at that.