Slow Havamal: 59

[kylec]

The 59th verse repeats that we should rise early, especially with no one to do our work for us, and get right to it. More than time is lost by sleeping in, but if we can get up, wealth is half-won.

Most of us don’t have slaves or hired help to perform our duties. We can do things ourselves, or leave them undone. In our society, as in the world of Havamal, the only people who can afford the luxury of late sleep are the rich, and the self-destructive idler.

Of course, that’s not always true of modern man. Much of what I own and do is founded upon a massive expenditure of fossil fuels. If I sleep late, the lights will still come on, and there will be meat at the grocery store. The subsistence needs met by a 9th century Norseman are already taken care of. But if I want to pay the electric and grocery bills, I still have to get up and do something to participate in the economy. We believed that cheap fuel and ever-advancing machines would spare us from incessant toil. What we got was just another kind of toil in order to buy fuel, machines, and their products. No matter what your lifestyle, there seems to be a certain amount of effort required to maintain that given level in all but the rarest cases.

Havamal encourages us not to dawdle. There are only so many hours in the day. I tend to default to thinking about the eight of them I need for work, but in truth, making a life requires a lot of other things, too. I need to keep up relationships with family and friends, tend to the home, and foster my intellectual and spiritual needs. Tunnel vision on paid work is a recent habit that makes us want to quantify time and the value of labor.

“You lose more than time,” Odin says. I’m not sure how the original Old Norse renders it, but even thinking of time as a quantity seems flawed. Time can’t be stockpiled if we don’t use it. In fact, we always do—we’re living every moment. “Use” in this case means productive labor. So we ceased to be ruled by the cycles of daylight and carved the hours and minutes into our wrists.

David Graeber points out that in most older cultures, the notion of a boss “owning” eight hours of my day and being able to make me work at anything and everything during that stretch was incomprehensible. You could own the product of my labor, and usually work was conducted for that product, and set aside when it was done. You could even own another human being, a slave. But you couldn’t own someone’s time. Now I hear people, especially those obsessed with efficiency, life hacks, and frugality, of assigning some wage value to an hour of their time as if it were fixed no matter what they’re engaged in.

“You lose more than time.” Some of us live longer than others, but for the most part, time is equal among men. We have the present. If it’s not time alone we squander—if time can’t be quantified like that—perhaps it’s opportunity. A moment is wide open to any action you can imagine and perform. String them together, and it changes the kind and quality of actions you can perform in the next moment. And the next. And the next. In that sense, I see our days from a timeless view as a necklace that we lay one stone at a time. There are many choices, but the beauty of it will depend not on any single element, but on the pattern and the quality of those elements both as a whole, and how they work with one another.

Wealth comes from the same root as the word “will.” So wealth is simply the product—the new circumstances and potentials for action in the moment—of our will. We have more needs than subsistence, or even fiat money. By rising early, a metaphor for being prepared and acting at the opportune moment with consistency, we string the life we want. That includes repairing roofs and raising livestock. It also involves things we often don’t expect, like a prayer before dawn, a game with a child, or a moment doing nothing but basking in the golden hour of sunset.

The sleeper also acts, because time cannot be saved, only spent. Sleep is good, but in this case it corresponds to failing to act out our will. There is more room for entropy to play out, and fewer conscious choices are made. The early-riser rarely arrives to fanfare or performs great deeds. He or she knows the good in life, and threads one humble piece onto the string of time. Then another. Then another.