I’m exhausted. I took a red-eye from Las Vegas to DC, which is a bad idea to begin with because the flight is only four hours long. Even if you sleep the whole time, you’re still exhausted. I didn’t sleep, though, partly because it’s hard to sleep on planes, and partly because the largest airplane neighbor I’ve ever had was pressed up against me and threatening to engulf my thigh in hers.
So I didn’t sleep at all, and I’m exhausted.
I can’t really afford to be exhausted, though. If I go to sleep at noon, which I desperately wanted to do, my schedule would be shot for days. And I have to do a touch Sett, do a language tape, and write a blog post.
It’s so easy to push that burden to your future self and suffer later. I’ll just write two blog posts tomorrow. I can skip a day on my language tape and leave it up to my future self to pick up the slack. Sett stuff can wait. And, hey, why not sleep now and fix that sleep schedule later?
I’m writing this post, though, so you can probably guess that I didn’t choose that path. I did my Russian, which was maddeningly frustrating, I pushed through until dinner time, and I’ve got this post locked down.
I’ll be so happy tomorrow when I wake up early and get to start the day without any baggage from today. I made the hard decision to suffer now, when suffering was really the only thing I could handle anyway. Tomorrow I’ll be rested and capable of doing a lot more than suffering.
My weird sleep fiasco is just an insignificant example, though. When working and there’s some jumble of code that needs to be fixed eventually, may as well suffer now. When a relationship is obviously not the right one, better to suffer through a breakup than put it off until later.
Suffering now isn’t always the right move, but it’s a decent place to start. When in doubt, suffer now.
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Photo is two girls asleep at about midnight on a chair in Bellagio.
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