Why dangle just one carrot on a stick? Give yourself many.
Week 3 of my challenge to become an early bird, I am waking consistently at 5 a.m. – but it hasn’t been a straight line. Week 1 was successful. Week 2 was shaky. Then came a month of angst and inconsistency as I struggled to not totally fail this challenge. Now in my final week, I serenely rose sans alarm clock at 5 a.m. every morning with complete assurance, pleasure, clarity and energy. How?
After a lifetime of failing to get up early, bucking self-defeat feels like a major achievement. But the true success for me lay in that black-hole month when I desperately searched for ways to not let myself down again. Instead of reverting back to bullying behavior of the you suck variety, I experimented with compassion and curiosity. The question I posed was a very depersonalized and koan-like,What felt better than my warm bed? The answers were the right two carrots on a stick.
- The Right Project
I happen to be taking an art class that uses as a textbook something I’d always dreaded: The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron. Cheesy, I dismissed, without ever cracking its cover. But forced to read it, I found myself to be a textbook case of a blocked creative. Talk about a change of heart. I committed myself mind, body and soul to the Artist’s Way. I spent my hours faithfully writing morning pages, answering its difficult questions on family, history and psyche, and coming face to face with my demons. The terrible honesty goes on to this day. You’ll find me at 5 a.m. wrapped in a blanket in my dim studio chipping away at a decade-long creative block in which not rising early was just a symptom.
Out of all the projects in the world, The Artist’s Way the right one because – this may sound weird – it interests both sides of my brain. Right brain because of the creative subject matter, the spotlight on itself, and the necessary use of love and trust in the research. It simply feels good and feels important – life-or-death-important. The left brain likes the solid guidebook structure, having Cameron as the seasoned guide, and her tried-and-true 12-step program aspect. Since both halves feel safe in this environment, both work together to rouse me from sleep – instead of battling each other for once.
- The Right Reason
The project now is to unblock myself creatively, and Cameron’s idea that the artist is a child gave me a face: myself as the invisible 5-year-old I was. This excited kid gets me up at 5 a.m. with that precise animal-instinct sense of time, pulling on my hand like my own daughter does, saying, “Come on, Mama!” I simply can’t disappoint her anymore. I don’t want to be someone a kid can’t trust, especially if that kid is mine – or is me.
She was the reason I needed, arrived at through soul-searching art, not science. Thing is that for it to genuinely work, she can’t be just a “visualization” or a “tool.” This creative brainchild is completely real to me, with genuine photos and memories. She’s always been here as a link to a higher logic, and she’s my perfect motivation. Not a muse, but the artist herself. No expert could have told me. She came as the light at the end of a lifelong tunnel.
It’s tempting to believe I outsmarted myself into waking early. In truth I simply treated myself with great kindness that led to working with strengths instead of against weaknesses. Did I do it in 21 straight habit-forming days? No (but so what). Did I do it for life? Very likely. Did I cellularly transform from night owl into early bird? Maybe only half my brain. Did I touch something sublime, greater and more profound than my original goal of waking early to get more stuff done? Most definitely. Thank you, Dalai Lama, for the secret of happiness.