15 minutes earlier

The Sonoma Diet gave me this gem of wisdom today, regarding ways to cure yourself of the myriad of excuses we use for falling off the diet bandwagon: “For example, if you grab a waffle in the morning because you "don't have time" to eat a Sonoma Diet breakfast, one solution would be to get up 15 minutes earlier.”

This seems to be the expert solution du jour for all kinds of woes. All I need to do, to achieve a perfect figure, perfect hair, perfect home, perfect finances, save the world and balance the Federal budget, is to get up 15 minutes earlier.

Any time you say, “Man, there just aren’t enough hours in the day to {task here}”, some well-meaning person will chirp up with, “You know what I would do? Just get up 15 minutes earlier and jump right to it!”

Yes. Because sleeping is such a waste of good task-doing time. Heavens, what was I thinking, lying around in my bed until 4:30, or even {gasp} 5:00 every morning! I should be getting up at 4:15 so I can pay bills! Make it 4:00 and I could be having a mushroom omelet per my Sonoma Diet meal plan! Or shoot, let’s go whole hog, make it 3:00 and I can wash the car, clean the kitchen floors, do a load of laundry, have the omelet and pay the bills!

So much better than an extra hour and a half of sleep, right?

I can and do occasionally forego an hour (or two) of sleep to handle some extraordinary circumstance. Say we’re going away for the weekend – I might get up early all week so that I can piecemeal the chores I usually do in leisurely fashion on Saturday.

But the idea of permanently giving up my sleep to handle things I don’t have time for during the day?

Hey – I’ve got an idea! How about if we drop a few things off the old to-do list instead?! Like, for example, putting together a mushroom-feta omelet ‘experience’ on a work-day morning.

Or trying to get twenty hours of work into a twenty-four hour day.

Or struggling so hard to have, do and be every groovy thing our world has on offer. Which, given the sheer volume of cool things out there, is pretty much impossible anyway; and who knows how many equally cool things we're missing out on, in our vain attempts to have ALL the groovy coolness?

Off the list: Trying to put together a three-ingredient, multi-step omelet on a workday morning. I’ll take a nice bowl of low-fat, low-sugar, whole-grain cereal, thanks. The mushroom-feta omelet can jolly well wait until the weekend, when I have considerably more time for prep, sautéing, eating, and then cleaning up the debris.