To be Awake

You know when you are sleeping and moments or seconds, you never can tell, before you wake up you realize you are sleeping? Then you try to wake your self up, but you can’t. It is as if you are strapped to the bed, or a spell has been put on you. If you see anything in this state it is dim and blurry. You lie there desperately straining your muscles but to no avail. You start to open your mouth to call out but nothing comes.

Once while napping on the couch, I had fallen into this state and dreamt that people were sitting on me, totally unaware of my presence. So you lay there struggling until the spell is broken. This is what I imagine when Thoreau says that, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” (8). These men strain and struggle against the darkness in their limbs–try to raise their voice only to call out in silent plea.

Or maybe some of us have willingly gone to this place of dim half sleep–what Thoreau calls, “resignation.” The light is too bright and the air a little chilly, so you curl up under a warm blanket and close your eyes. Look at how Thoreau puts it, “From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats” (8). Thus it would seem that the desperation does not exist out there, but in here.

But how does a man wake up? Who will wake him? These are the questions that drive me to read.

Now then, what does it look like to be awake? The first thing I always do immediately upon waking from sleep is to look at a clock. You always lose your sense of time when you are asleep. But wakefulness is not just knowing what time it is. Thus Thoreau says,

“In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line” (16).

To be awake is to be aware of where you are. To be aware of the present moment and of yourself as in that present moment. But still this is not enough. Thoreau says that the present moment is precisely at the meeting of “two eternities, the past and the future.” So to be fully aware of the present moment one must simultaneously see the past and the future as if you are standing in a doorway with one eye looking at where you have been and with the other eye seeing where you will go. Ah, but you mustn’t dwell on either. Rather stand in that in-between place, not as an in-between place, but as the totality of reality–this is all there really is, this is life.