Too Early to Cause Alarm

I woke up this morning at six AM--two hours before my alarm--and layed there with my eyes shut, feigning the opposite. Clinging, in a bleary-eyed morning daze, to a faith that my body and mind would fall back asleep if I could just overwhelm myself with hope. Sadly, the old rehabbed wooden windows that rattled me awake in the first place continued their arrhythmic drumming and, in a wind of sighs, I eventually whipped off my covers and stormed to the shower in defeat.

This happens from time to time to everyone, I assume, whenever your body awakens before "it's supposed to". Meaning, of course, that the fine-tuned morning regiment of obeying one's alarm occasionally fails in the most unexpected manner: preemptively. There's nothing surprising about sleeping through the calming drone of NPR or, for the true logs among us, even the robotic stomp of the beeps and buzzers. When someone receives more sleep than they apportioned for, that's viewed as a symptom of necessity. But waking up before that preset switch in bedroom volume? Before the weather and traffic together? That's no regular occurrence. That's just purely divine defiance, losing the bet before the deal. No one bolts out of bed early and shrugs, "Well, guess I only needed five hours of sleep last night! What a life!" No way, we all act just as I did and suggest, by mental and/or physical force, that we continue to lay shrouded in our cave of covers until the appropriate pronouncement, until the very right moment when we should--when we normally do--rise from our hibernatory state and get up.

Such a stubborn refusal to accept the morning's arrival only serves as punishment for an immutable, unchangeable course of events. Ultimately, no amount of base-level self-trickery will reverse the early day. I guess such occasions act as reminders that the "it's supposed to"-ness of life follows a lead unhindered by the human invention of calculated time. It's just too bad we can't all take naps at work.