Vacation Day 1: Power Coma

Yesterday evening I was winding down from a day that was more physical than I realized: I used the gym after work for 45 minutes of strength training, I cycled about 30 kilometers in total during the blazing afternoon, and topped it all off with a 5.8 kilometer run in the early evening, when it was still 29 Celsius. Afterward, I shopped for some essential groceries I lacked, had a late supper, and then continued with learning programming languages. It started off as a part of a exercise to learn how to manage loops and other repetitive tasks in JavaScript.

I was directed to create five of my own statements to insert and play around with in the lines of code to use in the exercise. Since I was anticipating my first full vacation day, which started the next morning, I made some statements about what I had in store for me. I had no plan really, so I wrote these five lines centred on the theme of  "Tomorrow, I have. . .", which stated:

1. console.log("no one else's problems or issues to deal with")
2. console.log("nothing pressing or urgent to attend to")
3. console.log("no agenda to satisfy, or role to play; only to seek out leisure")
4. console.log("the freedom to use my energy as I see fit")
5. console.log("the freedom to use that time to devote to re-inventing myself, and to become someone better, in some way")

I was frustrated because, despite using the correct formats, the stupid tutorial itself was corrupted, and I couldn't complete the module after playing around with it for about half an hour. But I think that composing and repeatedly reading and writing those things during that time, circulating them through my mind again and again, trying to make a block of code function, did something miraculous. I inadvertently made those five lines a kind of mantra, which reset my brain just before I went to bed (which was really early for me, 9:45 PM). After that, I slept soundly for 11 hours straight . . .

I don't think I've ever slept for that long before at any time in my life: not even at times when I was really sick, a victim of heatstroke, jetlagged, impaired by medication, or even after some bouts of inebriation back in a more foolish past. Seeing those five lines was liberating, and perhaps shut down my mind long enough to allow my body to show me just how exhausted I've become. I probably would have slept longer too had the dog not woke me up, either because of a desperate need to relieve herself outside, or just because she was so concerned that I was in bed for that long.

So for today: the tomorrow that I was writing about yesterday, I still have no plan, I'm actually still sleepy. It will start with waking up by going out for coffee someplace, someplace new for me, and see what happens from there on in . . .