Slow Havamal: 58

[kylec]

The 58th verse tells us to wake up early to take someone’s property or his life. Sleeping wolves and warriors rarely get the food or victories they seek.

There’s a lot of eminently practical advice in Havamal, and this verse holds another example. It cautions against laziness or procrastination. “Well-begun is half done,” we might say. Lying in bed dreaming of things is warm and pleasant, but only the doer has any hope of realizing them.

It’s a common ailment to want things without wanting to put in the work. For starters, unless we’ve done the thing a hundred times, it’s hard to imagine exactly what’s required of us to accomplish a given task. We dream of gold, but not the pick-axe and the mine. It wouldn’t be so hard to rise if we’d been through the paces before and knew they were the only way, like the hungry wolf. In that sense, we often imagine our goals as gifts from Santa, reclining by the fireplace when we yawn into the living room at 9 am.

What would we want if we could see things as the whole experience? In other words, if instead of isolating a handful of gold, or a victory in battle, we saw it as inseparable from the years of hard work, the moments of exhilaration and suffering, the clang of metal, long walks under burden, losses, gains, and losses again—what if we understood we couldn’t have the golden crown without taking the entire body it resides upon, in all its majesty and repulsiveness, along with it? Practically, a goal is only separate from the actions which bring it about in the same way that each moment of the present is separate from the next moment of the future. We can slice experience however thick or thin we want it. One thing leads to the next, and eventually we find what we call the “ends,” then we go on breathing and walking and worrying after that. If we saw the chain of actions as a whole, would we still long for the thing worshipfully? Or would we groan out of bed and lope off after it with the quiet determination of an animal that knows what it takes to go to bed full?

Dreams are insufficient, and more so when there is another will opposed to your own, like there will be for the wolf and the warrior. We must act, and the sooner the better. If the only one stopping me sleeps in while I make headway, my job just got easier. This is true of literal sleep, and the vacillating moods that make us put off things we know we ought to do, but which paralyze us with the inertia of setting them in motion.

Rising early sucks. It’s tiresome and cold, and there are few companions out. Doing something difficult requires a focused will, able to put off temporary comfort for longer-term gain. Success looks easy from the outside, when all we see is a montage of glory, but on the cutting room floor lies every minute of work that brought those people to that moment. And while some people seem to get there easier than others, for the most part, if we want something we have to see it for what it really is: a string of early mornings, cold woods, bloody clashes, and at the fleeting tip of the experience, a moment of victory before we awake to do it again.