Your dreams demand your best hours
a short reflection on the inequality of time
There are hours in a day, and then there are your best hours. Your dreams demand your best hours.
As a night owl’s night owl, I used to treat the 24-hour day like a loose construct—sleep negotiable, day and night arbitrary. It was effective for grinding through the infamous 60 to 80 to occasional 100-hour weeks of studying, training, or working. I coped by cramming life into the leftover hours: scheming while I walk, gymming at 1 a.m., writing in the dead of night, scrolling myself to sleep.
Complicating it all, I’m not a creature of routine but of bursts—I come alive in flashes, not on fixed schedules. Hence it’s all the more challenging to promise hours to someone else and still have enough for myself. (I always envied those who could live like metronomes, summoning their best selves on command.)1
What I didn’t realize before, and still keep realizing, is that not all hours are created equal. There are hours in a day, and then there are your best hour…