The 5 AM Club

“You missed the 5 AM club, hun” I quipped as my fiancé came down the stairs at 8:30 a.m. (yes, I have a fiancé!).

“I’ve been up for almost an hour!” I added, somehow feeling triumphant that I’d pulled myself out of bed at the same time I used to arrive at the office back in the day, having gone for a run, had breakfast, and commuted first. Those days…

“It’s one less hour until bedtime,” Steve responded with a shrug. He rubbed his eyes, put on his glasses and then smirked as he made eye contact, “I’m Winning.”

I sighed from my perch on the couch, refusing to admit defeat, “It will be a miracle if our engagement survives this lockdown.”

“You’re telling me,” was the immediate retort.

This is an exchange we have frequently, thankfully still in jest.

It’s been a heck of a long time since I’ve blogged and for those of you who have no idea what has happened in my life…. this summary should suffice. I knew I wanted to pick up my blog again but wasn’t sure how exactly since it’s a travel blog and I was no longer traveling all the time. But then EVERYONE stopped traveling all the time. And I realized how much I’d love to mentally escape by blogging and re-living some more recent trips. So, check back as I’ll be keeping this up more regularly! Anyways, there’s more to this 5 AM club story:

Just three months ago, Steve and I spent three weeks trekking our way through New Zealand’s South Island with a sub-set of the amazing group I’d trekked with in the Everest region [Teaser- stay tuned for a belated blog post on this most incredible adventure!]. Anyways, throughout the trip Steve carried around a book that he would [occasionally] read. It’s one of those business-y books that he loves, this one called “The 5 AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life.” Apparently it’s based on the idea that some really successful business people get up and do things at 5 a.m. [IMO, when you sleep and wake up is a “to each their own” kind of thing but if people feel better being part of a middle-of-the-night club then go for it.]

Steve kept saying he was joining the club when we got home from the trip and he actually did really well for the first few days! (when the jetlag had us both up in the wee hours, I might add). It became a bit of a joke after that, but the joke used to be that he’d missed the club by an hour or two, at most. Today he was almost 4 hours late! And happy about it! My how times have changed.

We live in a remote (albeit beautiful) town in northern England that my friend Michael refers to as “Sheepville”. Yet we love where we live and have felt like the world is our oyster, especially this year. Shortly after returning from New Zealand we (actually it was me) found a last-minute deal for a week-long ski ‘holiday’ in France and we took the “Snow Express” bus there from London. We returned from the Alps in early March, jubilant about what an incredible start we were off to this year [#Winning]. And, we even had more trips planned in the coming months, a bachelorette party and stag-do included. And, THEN, 2020 would culminate with our October wedding on Cape Cod, where I was born and where we got engaged last summer. I remember feeling very lucky to have this incredible year in front of me. Yet in hindsight that feeling is a distant memory. I realize now that I had absolutely no idea how lucky I really was… those days.

Let me be clear that I’m still very, very, very lucky. Steve and I, and our families, are safe, healthy (knocking on wood), and financially okay. I have a new-found daily (often hourly) appreciation for those things. I appreciate a lot of things much more now… with an intensity that comes from my core. Flour, puppy kisses, clean sheets, vinyl records, my Peloton, the Internet… the list goes on. My emotions generally vacillate between gratitude, fear, restlessness, nervous boredom, regular boredom, and sometimes that zoned-out place of peace and content.

That is what life feels like now… moments of forgetting mixed in with moments of feeling the weight of the world, sometimes with a weight so heavy it feels paralyzing. A time of crisis yet oddly calm and serene. More calm and serene than ever, actually. It’s all very disconcerting. My favorite time of day is early in the morning… those few seconds of lucidity while tagging-in to the conscious world again. Those first few, innocent moments of rubbing my eyes, stretching a little, maybe piecing together fragments of a dream recalled… then, BAM! It hits me. I remember. And while I may distract myself for brief periods later in the day, that first time in the day is the one time when I really forget. Those 20 seconds… before the BAM! Those few seconds count, though. I’m scared that one day I’ll lose those few seconds. That I’ll remember all of the time. That my dreams will be based in this new reality. And that I’ll forget what life used to be like. Deep breaths… carry on.

Many of the things that we relied on for structure, distraction, safety, and, well, purpose, those things were stripped away in what felt like a heartbeat. Our worlds have been rocked and for the first time in my lifetime our collective world has been rocked. Like victims of an earthquake, we cautiously navigated the rubble, bracing as each aftershock deepened the cracks in the earth’s foundation. Slowly we stopped trying to fix it and are just holding on for dear life. That’s where we are right now, and it’s scary as shit. Nobody is alone right now. Same boat. All of us. Just holding on.

I do believe that how we’re all feeling right now will be fleeting. We will adapt and come to a new normal. But we must be patient. And that is hard. We are used to having things when we want them and even before we want them. We are annoyed when Uber says 5 minutes and takes 7… or shows up in 3. We expect instant gratification and a timeline, as well as options. And we fulfill our end of the bargain to be able to afford such services- we know the expectations, the drill. The long workdays and workweeks, the sacrifices, the time apart from our family, the staying busy and productive… we know the drill and even find comfort in the drill. But the world is different now. There is no drill anymore. The gig is up on the drill. We miss the drill yet now question the necessity of the drill in the first place. It used to all feel so important. It felt like life or death.

I feel like I was part of an advance team of sorts for processing feelings like this; feelings I know many people are now experiencing. I’m not the only advance team member by any means… we know who each other are, like members a secret club. Let me be clear that when I was still in the corporate grind, I was most definitely NOT part of the advance team. But in hindsight, I can tell you which of my colleagues were. They were the ones who boldly took two and even three-week vacations (unheard of!), and often to places I had never heard of. They worked hard and were good at their jobs, almost universally, but did not check email while on vacation. They made sure their work was covered and they went for it. Their ‘Out of Office’ response: “I am on vacation with no access to email” the corporate version of a YOLO face tattoo. They were not martyrs about work (you know, the people who wear their ridiculous number of hours in the office as a badge of honor). In fact, the opposite was true. The advance team saw work for what it was. An aspect of our life but definitely not our entire life. The advance team saw life itself as the most important thing. A shift, for sure.

When I left my job, I had an existential crisis of my own and I like to consider myself a late member of the advance team (not to be confused with the club, the advance team can get up whenever we want). I feel like OG advance team members were born and raised that way, with a worldly perspective. I most definitely was not. I gained that perspective when I left my job, left the drill that I had found so much comfort in, and I threw myself into two years of bopping around the world on my own and without much a plan. I processed my new reality as I saw more of the incredible beauty, incredible joy, and incredible despair in the very big world in which we all live. Basically, I had the great fortune of being able to process the topsy-turvy nature of how my values were changing and my views were changing in the most ideal and easily distractible environment possible: a global backdrop. This is pretty much the complete opposite of the current environment in which many people must process similar emotions. People just like me. I can’t imagine realizing life went on without me going to the office as I sat in my apartment staring at a wall. I just don’t see that going well.

I’ve come to realize that there are very few things for which I am uniquely qualified. But giving unsolicited advice on this topic may actually be one (likely the only):

Hang in there; make this time okay for you and your family – if you have one- if not, make it okay for you. Remember that this is likely the only time in your lifetime you’ll have the opportunity to spend this amount of time with your children, partner, pets, plants or all of the above or none of the above. For sure this is the first time you’ll be able to be with yourself for this extended period of time- your best friend and your worst enemy. I get it. We all do. We’re all chasing connection right now…maybe we always have been.

You are okay, you are probably lonely, and you are doing the best you can. We all are. Same-same as before all of this, but now without the outside constructs that used to provide purpose and allow us to feel productive. With those things stripped away it all seems simpler and also scarier. Yet life goes on somehow. And life stands out right now as the thing that matters most.

As far as expectations right now, the bar is low, and our job is clear: Exhale. And then inhale. And then carry on, all of us, together. That’s what we do now; it’s what we need now, in fact, it’s really all we need now. It’s the new drill, the new 5 AM club. It’s Winning.

And, while the virus will eventually go, and our circumstances will inevitably change, I can’t help wondering if maybe our new drill will not. Nobody knows what the future holds; I have to keep reminding myself to stop trying to guess. One day at a time and one breath at a time, fully appreciating both. That’s all that really matters right now…and maybe forever…and, hopefully, forever.