Before You've Decided Anything

There’s a window that opens when you first become conscious — before you’ve decided anything, before the day has made any claim on you. It lasts somewhere between ten seconds and two minutes. During it, the morning is genuinely open. Nothing has gone wrong yet. No decisions have been made poorly. The shape of the day is still yours to determine.

Then one of two things happens.

In one version: you get up. The window closes behind you as you pass through it. The day begins in whatever condition it begins, but you’re in it — upright, committed, already past the first choice.

In the other version: you hit snooze. The window doesn’t close — it just starts to darken. Nine minutes later it opens again, slightly smaller, slightly more clouded by the knowledge that you’ve already negotiated with yourself once. You snooze again. The window narrows. By the third time, it’s barely a crack of light, and the quality of the time that remains in bed is different: not rest, not sleep, but something more like hiding.

The regret of snoozing is strange because it precedes being fully awake. You feel it through the fog. Something closed while you weren’t paying attention, and now you’re trying to remember what it felt like when it was open.

Mornings have a particular light that doesn’t last. Not just the literal light — the internal kind. The window is real. You can learn to pass through it.

dontsnooze.io — for the mornings when knowing this isn’t enough.