We Must Imagine Sisyphus With Coffee

When I was a kid, I hated to go to sleep. That’s normal, of course—when you’re little, your parents determine your bedtime, and you get the sense that you’re missing out on something incredible, even if you might not understand what it is. For me, however, the issue wasn’t early-onset FOMO. It was fear of death.

Sleep terrified me. How could I willingly descend into unconsciousness, with no firm promise that I would return to wakefulness? That chasm between bedtime and my mother or father waking me up was a discontinuity I could not abide—it didn’t make sense. Yes, I was returning to consciousness each morning, but how could I say that I even existed before that moment when I opened my eyes, or that I would exist again after closing them 14–16 hours later? The unbeing of sleep was what I imagined of death, an infinite blank of unawareness. Dreams might interrupt the blankness, but I knew they were not real, and they faded within minutes. But then even reality seemed like an illusion: I often wondered whether I existed only within the dream of a giant, and when it woke up I would vanish. A decade or so later, when I read Descartes, his malicious demon was all too familiar to me; sleep was the loss of subjectivity. Dormio ergo non sum.

And so little Matt would lie there, anxious, exhausted, hugging his blanket and sucking his thumb and twirling his hair, afraid of what sleep might bring—the all-too-predictable end of his own fragile consciousness. And then, of course, he’d fall asleep, the biological imperative overtaking an overactive imagination. And he would wake up in the morning, restoring continuity, and begin the cycle all over again.

Today, I am proud to announce, I have overcome this irrational fear¹. Almost every night I am able to submit myself to sleep without anxiety, confident that I will return to myself come morning. The data I’ve amassed is overwhelming: For 50 years now, I’ve gone to sleep as me and woken up as me, and unless there really is a malicious demon behind it all, that’s the way things are going to continue for another 50–80 years. Still, occasionally, as I lie in my comfy bed with the lights off, my childhood fear grips me again, and my heart thuds in my chest, and the coming loss of consciousness—of me-ness—looms like an apocalypse, and I wonder, What if… And then I fall asleep, and then I wake up.

And what a miracle is the morning! This—not the inevitability of death nor the impossibility of an afterlife—is what I want to talk about today. It’s Christmas, did you think I was going to bring you down?

It wasn’t until I was in my mid-thirties that I learned to appreciate mornings. Till then, getting up before 9 a.m., let alone before 8, was a challenge I did not consider accepting. Why rise? Not when my bed was warm and my body needed recovery from the past late night’s adventures. What could possibly be worth the discomfort²?

Then Jean and I had our first child, Sasha, and all of a sudden it didn’t matter what I wanted at 6 a.m. I was needed. I had to be up to feed, change, and entertain this implacable addition to our family. I wish I could say adapting to this new routine was difficult, but I really don’t remember—either I was so sleep-addled it didn’t compute or my sense of necessity outweighed my laziness. But quite quickly, the childcare tasks grew easier, and I found myself up and awake in the early mornings with, for the first time, time. Time to go running. Time to make coffee and drink it. Time to listen closely to the news on the radio, to the birds twittering outside our windows, to nothing at all because the rest of New York has not yet gotten moving. Yes, those are clichés, and I abhor clichés, but they’re also real, and worth savoring.

This may be cliché, too, but: I love the fact of a fresh start. Even though the malicious demon does not exist, even though the discontinuity of sleep is an illusion, the morning’s return to consciousness always feels like a reinvention—like magic. I was not, and now I am! Surgo ergo sum! My body has processed so much overnight: food, water, and the worries of the now-unreachable past. The aches, in both body and soul, are a little milder. (Still there, of course, but milder! I’ll take it!) My mind is clear, or as clear as it ever gets, so I can think and write and work the way I want, before the microtraumas of the day begin to accumulate³.

And then, after the coffee and the running and the writing and the appreciating of the stillness and the clear-eyed look at life and the day ahead: a hot shower. This is all I need, these few first glorious hours of the day, this renaissance that reassures me of the persistence of my own existence, and of the daily opportunity to reinvent the present and the future. Sure, I may not take the universe up on that opportunity to any great extent, but I recognize that it’s there, that I have a chance, this morning and every morning. And that’s enough for me.

There are, however, two big problems with this. (What, you thought I was going to simply be happy?) For one, after I’ve emerged from the shower, shaved and dressed, my day feels done, though it might only be 10 a.m. What more can I accomplish? What can I look forward to besides the sweetness of sleep and tomorrow’s rise? Why bother with the remaining daylight hours, when worry and fatigue will only grow? And yet I can’t just go back to bed: My body and brain and sense of duty, to my work and to my family, will not allow me. The day must be endured, the chores and anxieties dealt with, so that I can earn my rest—and my next morning’s revelations.

The other is, I hope, more transitory. Lately, I can’t wake up. It might be the season, but this winter’s cold and darkness are hitting different. Though the alarm rings at 6:30, I’m opening my eyes to glance at my phone an hour or more later, and the fact of the missed morning strikes me in my gut. What have I been doing? Where am I? What’s even left for me of the most precious part of the day? Maybe once a week now I’m able to wrench myself out of the covers at 6, but it’s never guaranteed. The snooze button is always right there, dividing my morning into nine-minute increments of extended rest.

In some ways, I appreciate the snooze zone as much, or more than, the hours of sleep that came before. For an hour or so, I’m not exactly asleep—I’m aware of my surroundings, of the stirring of my wife next to me and the increasing traffic outside our window—but I’m far from awake. I dream in this time, and music or news from the radio intrudes to shape the dreams, which evaporate when I do finally wake up, leaving only their residue of unreality⁴. When I snooze, I don’t know where I am, or who, but still I have a vague sense that I’m inhabiting the chasm between yesterday and today that used to scare me with its vast obscurity. And that, too, is something to love about the morning—that it offers us, every day, a new opportunity to reflect on the unlikely but indisputable fact of our own existence. We were, we are, and we will be. Things will end, and they will begin again, and if we’re lucky we might just get to spend some time in between. 🪨🪨🪨

In recent years, I’ve developed a craving for inventive French-style pastries, and Lady Wong Patisserie, which has two locations in NYC and will deliver by mail, has become my go-to. Their schtick is blending those classical pastry styles and techniques with Southeast Asian flavors such as coconut, pandan, and mango, and they do it marvelously, alongside a selection of traditional kuih. My fave? Anything ube-blackberry. Bonus: their sambal, which just got a write-up in New York Mag.