It is an odd experience, feeling sick and being cognizant of your own manifestation abilities.

I can now see how being sick is a stiff roadblock in my ability to get things manifested according to my vision; I am drowned in a series of negative emotions.  My body hurts, my energy is sapped, and my reactions are irritable in nature.

While in such a state, is it any wonder I am having trouble manifesting?

The best thing I have found that I can do is hole up by myself while I heal.  Find a quiet corner in a cafe, sit in my office, read a book, surf online, watch a movie or three.  By retreating, I allow my body the time it needs to heal.

If I put myself into the functional world, where I can be demanded upon for any number of requests, reactions, or actions and attentions, I find my abilities to maintain a positive emotional state are taxed beyond capability.  The negative reactions feed further negative emotions, and I am soon left unhappy with everything.

The challenge for my current life state is that I am a father, and when I am with my children, they do not understand anything so foreign as ‘leave Daddy alone right now.’  I can either remove myself entirely from the house, or I can subject myself to their entirely reasonable and predictable demands for attention and love

While I am in a depressed state (not depressed the emotion, although I suppose there is an aspect to this being an emotional state that corresponds with depression in the physical sense) I am not able to field their requests rightly.  This morning I woke up to Zaden screaming for his mommy.  “She’s at the gym, and I am going to be with you for the next ninety minutes” is not a reasonable explanation to hium; he just wants his mommy.

I know what the solution is in this case.  He needs to be picked up gently, cradled even, and moved to the nursery where I can rock him in the rocking chair, wrapped in a soft blanket.  After fifteen minutes of crying, he will either wake up or fall completely asleep.

For a while, I would rise at 6 am to shower and get myself some juice, and then hang out in the nursery waiting for them to wake.  Lately I have taken to sleeping with them, in order to maximize my healing time and kick this sickness, and I get the awful wakeup call that I have endured for the last few days.

This is not the proper way to start my day.  Even the risk of such a wakeup is enough for me to go back to rising earlier, to ensure that I have the proper emotional beginning to my day.

No more sleeping in past six for me.  When I get started early, I have the opportunity to stretch, to read, to think, and to just be, alone in my house.  That is a rare enough occurence that I cannot give it up for something so base as sleep.

Now that the kids are going to bed earlier, since I am coming home earlier, I find this is not so precious a resource as before.  When Indi was staying up until 10:30 or 11 on a regular basis, and I was getting up at 5 am every day, sleep was a continual problem.  With flu season upon us, and an intensive exercise regimen requiring me to sleep to rebuild my torn muscles, I needed sleep intensely.  By erring on the side of caution, and blocking out ever more time for sleep, I think we have found a good solution: don’t stay out working until 8 pm.  When I get home at nearly nine, the kids are wound up and waiting for me.  If I get home before 7, they will go to bed at a reasonable hour, and so will Johanna and I.

Trying to sleep in past 7 in addition to this is too much.  I am not the type of man that requires nine hours of sleep, and with my goals in life, I cannot afford that much time wasted so passively.  (An exception would be if I slept eight hours, and napped during the day to increase productivity.  More on that challenge another time.)

My new paradigm is this: I will rise every day at 6 am, and be in bed by 10 pm.  Eight hours will make me happy, wealthy, and wise.