When is breaking the rules allowed? When is it wrong to satisfy the unquenchable full knowing that another hour awake might make sense in the moment but make impossible the next morning?
I've heard it said one should learn the rules so one can break the rules. By knowing the rules, you enter a society of others who believe the rules are important. By demonstrating your knowledge of the rules, it shows you have taken the time to learn the rules, thus signifying that you respect tradition enough to do what has always been done before (which is to learn the rules so you can then with wisdom show how witty you are when breaking the rules in your own unique way). Hopefully, you'll break them differently than anyone has ever broken them before, hence proving to all how wise you are for having devised your own iconoclastic manner.
In this way you establish your own niche, your own salutation, your own identity.
I'm breaking the rule on January fifth, 2010. It's 11:42 PM. I should already be asleep. I should have been quiet and reflecting at 10:30 so that by 11:00 my head was still and my body could repair itself. I wasn't supposed to eat either -- because then the body isn't repairing because it is digesting. But I had half a cantaloupe, another failure noted.
After decades of following my intellectual whims, of finding that the early morning hours are the hours I can get the closest to my own God, feel the strongest connection with the words that insist on flowing through me, vibrate with those who have passed this way already and left behind literature that shows they were here. After decades of being unable to understand the reason for going to bed at a reasonable hour, I finally acknowledge the necessity of specific sleep during certain hours. My gall bladder and my liver need to repair so I can release alopecia, xanthomas, and even a subterranean anxiety that I've known intimately about the same amount of time as I've bypassed going to bed at a reasonable hour.
Yet, tonight, I had to break the rules. Even with the inspiration of Arianna Huffington and Glamour's Cindi Leive all tucked up in their high thread count, even with the thousands of women and perhaps men who've decided that tonight they too will bypass all distractions and enter slumber earlier and stay asleep longer than usual, here I sit at my desk unable not to write tomorrow's 500 words today.
Today got sidetracked. Tomorrow is already taken. Tonight I finished Part two of the Netflix "Sons And Lovers," the film adaptation of one of D.H. Lawrence's first and most famously endearing novels. Five nights ago I watched "Women In Love" for perhaps the third time in my life. All this inspired after reading about DH in a book entitled Passionate Lives, in which John Tytell explores the lives of writers D.H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath ... as they were all in (and out) of love.
The minute the movie was over, I should have snapped shut my laptop and sent my head to that hidden place where dreams unfold. But I remembered I have a shelf of D.H. and I just had to know what I can pull down and take with me tomorrow, which is now today, when I'll have so little time to myself to be myself, when busy taking care of the business that keeps me myself. Alive indeed and breathing, but still unexpressed, unexposed, unhappily waiting for my time. Hence, my need to describe this moment accomplished before I resign myself to sleep. Tomorrow I'll do better. I'll eat properly earlier and get to sleep more quickly.