There’s something really great about being woken up by the sunrise.

I left my curtains up and my window open a bit last Saturday night as I fell asleep, and although the sun woke me up a couple hours earlier than I would have liked, it was the greatest way I’d gotten out of bed all year.

It seems pretty obvious as to why that’d be nice, but, as it was for me, the cliche gets overlooked.

It’s nice because it’s just what it is and nothing more. When my iPhone alarm goes off, it represents something else — I didn’t set it because I love the sound of sirens; I needed it to wake me up so I could get somewhere at a certain time.

When the sun comes in your window and your sleeping mind acknowledges it, rolls over and wakes up, there’s no distracting symbol-making going on; the sun is shining, and you’re seeing it.

Now, that’s a dang good way to start the day.

If a siren wakes you up, you automatically associate it with getting up, with progress, with starting a “brand new day.” Maybe that sounds like a good thing to have on your mind in the morning, but I think it’s a trap in disguise.

It’s as if the sound turns your whole day into an abstraction. This recorded noise has you thinking on an imaginary foot. Like a dinner bell signalling a make-believe dinner, your alarm tells you a “new day” has begun.

But, really, what’s changed since last night? The earth has made a complete rotation on its axis, sure, and you’ve probably got another round of the same stuff you did yesterday to do again, but there’s been no dramatic fact-of-the-universe-esque shift that’s made any “progress.”

Modern society’s current conceptualization of time is useful, but it doesn’t change the fact that “now” is, in the only true sense, one big long day. Where is there a place to draw a line and say you’ve got something new? You could sit in one corner of outerspace and stare in one direction for a hundred million years, and maybe nothing will appear to move in the slightest — not a problem.

Our compulsion to break our lives up into little, managable pieces might have a helpful evolutionary purpose, and it will definitely get you to class on time. But we’re smart enough now to realize that those distinctions we make are purely symbolic — they do not exist in any way outside our minds.

So why do we let it creep into our understanding of our lives and feel as though that if we’re not constantly improving ourselves in little incremental steps that we’re  under threat of missing out on something? Nothing else in the universe works that way. It just goes on “now-ever.”

So to remind me what I really am, I prefer to leave the blinds open. There’s no messing with crazy abstractions when the light of the sun wakes you up.

Will Beaton is the Editor-in-Chief of The Dakota Student. He can be reached at [email protected].