GNT #179: 4:35 is basically morning
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"...his non-conformist personality, his instincts as a rebel, his curiosity, his passions and detachments - intertwined with his political side and his scientific side... Character and imagination and creative genius were all related, as if part of some unified field."
Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe
A few nights ago I woke up in the dark and couldn't fall back to sleep.
If you're built like me, you know this one. You surface at some indecent hour, and instead of sinking back under, your brain clocks in for the day. So you lie there. You wait. You try to want it badly enough that it happens.
For years, that was my entire strategy. Stay in bed. Don't move. White-knuckle it until sleep took pity on me.
Then my sleep doctor at the Mayo Clinic told me to stop.
She calls it stimulus control. If you can't fall back asleep, don't lie there negotiating with the ceiling. Get up. Go to another room. Read something boring until your body gets tired on its own.
All time in bed is not equal.
So that night, careful not to look at a single clock, because the number only makes it worse, I felt my way downstairs to EJ's comfy reading chair and went hunting for the most boring book in the house.
This is a real category of decision in the middle of the night.
The Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide? No.
Michael Crichton's Timeline? No.
Structures: Why Things Don't Fall Down? Maybe.
(Where did we get all of these books?)
An Einstein biography. Perfect.
I opened it and started where you're not supposed to start if you actually want to enjoy a book. The cover. The cast of characters. The slow front matter.
Reading with no agenda is a different act than reading to get somewhere. I wasn't hunting for the interesting part. I just let the boring seep in.
Then I hit this line: "his story is a testament to the connection between creativity and freedom."
OK... (cracks knuckles).... And I was wide awake.
Creativity and freedom. That was the exact thing I'd been tangled in all week, without knowing to call it that.
Because I'd spent the whole week stuck on this newsletter.
Not blocked. I love writing it. One of my favorite parts of the whole thing is hearing back from you: an idea resonated, or pulled up a story from your own life, or handed you a new thought to chase. That is the point for me. Keep the idea and energy ripples going. What you send back genuinely shapes what I write next.
But this week, for the first time in three years, I sat down and felt paralyzed.
I kept picturing you reading it, which I always do. Except this time I wasn't picturing you so much as scanning for what would resonate. Running each idea past an imaginary room before it was even a sentence. Would this one work? Would that one? By the time I'd checked a thought against the reaction I was hoping for, the thought was gone...swirl swirl swirl.
You can see where this is going.
I was doing the exact thing my sleep doctor told me not to do. Lying there, wanting it badly enough to force it, gripping the one part I don't control: what you'll make of it.
All time in bed is not equal. It turns out all time at the keyboard isn't either.
So I did the only thing that has ever worked. I got up. I stopped trying. I picked up a boring book with no agenda. And the idea walked in the moment I stopped checking it against the room first.
That is the thing Isaacson keeps circling. Einstein's rebellion, his refusal to fall in line, wasn't a quirk sitting beside the genius. It was part of the same unified field. The not-conforming was the engine.
I don't think that's reserved for physicists.
Non-conformity, the ordinary kind available to all of us, is a refusal to shape what you make around the reaction you're hoping for. You never control the reaction anyway. You only control what you make. So make the thing you'd make if no one were keeping score.
I'm not going to stop picturing you. I wouldn't want to. Keeping you in mind was never the problem. Trying to win the room before I'd written a word was the problem.
I should tell you how the night ended. At some point I forgot myself and looked at the clock.
4:35.
Which is basically 5, right? And 5 is morning. So... good morning coffee and a cheers to one of the prettiest sunrises through steamy summer windows.
And this, the thing you're reading right now, is the newsletter I couldn't write. I gave up on the one you might approve of and told you about 4:35 instead.
What would you make this week if you stopped running it past the room first?
I'm always rooting for you. See you next week.
-Colleen
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