When my friend was in high school, he and a few of his buddies decided to make the trip from the San Francisco Bay Area to Disneyland in Southern California, spend two days at the park, and then drive home.

In a weekend.

That’s an eight hour trip, mind you.  Drive Friday night.  Do the Park Saturday and Sunday.  Drive home Monday morning.

Go to class Monday morning.

My buddy, of course, fell asleep in class that morning.  The teacher, clearly not amused, quietly had his class slip out and the next class sneak in.  My buddy awoke to a room full of strange faces and a cheek glued to his desk in a puddle of drool.

In high school, many of us would try this stuff.  Thought we could do it.  Sometimes we could.  But nowadays, in what one friend of mine calls my advanced age, there is no way.  In fact, I sometimes have trouble just reading a book at three o’clock in the afternoon.

Eat, sleep, and be weary can be a very real pattern of my existence.

I never knew why.  I though it was because I was old.  Or because I watched the end of the Sunday Night Football game from the East Coast.

But I began to discover that what I was eating had as much to do with my afternoon fog as how I was sleeping.

I discovered that there is a rhythm to how my body processes certain foods.  Sugar in the morning or at lunch almost invariably leads to dullness and drowsiness in the afternoon.  When I started eating slow-burning fats for breakfast and lunch instead, I had more energy longer into the day.

Suddenly I could read a book in the afternoon, stay awake, and remember what I read!

It isn’t that fat is always good and sugar always bad. What I started to discover was that when I ate something was at least as important as what I ate.  An egg in the morning meant more energy in the afternoon.  A little honey in the evening meant better sleep that night.

I know I am late to the game in all this.  You’ve probably got this all figured out by now.  I find myself on a steep learning curve, just trying to catch up.

And here is the primary thing I am learning: It is not just that we are time-bound from the beginning; it is also that we are earth-bound going forward.

As with time, we are not meant to live as if we lack connection with the earth that provides our food, that regulates our sleep.  The ancient Christian mystics expressed this by putting limitations on how much one should eat or sleep.  They weren’t trying to inhibit joy, but rather enable it. Much of what they taught was framed by the ancient Greek Scriptures that spoke of a future where God comes down to put in right order and rhythm this earth-bound existence He created in the first place.

Escape was never the plan, if you were to believe the Greek Scriptures.  Perpetual embodiment is.  So that the more we pay attention to our gut—and I mean that in the most literal sense—the better off we are going to feel/think/relate/learn…be.

This means developing and implementing a rhythm to our exercise, to our sleep patterns, to what we jam in our faces.  We were never meant to live as if these were obstacles to overcome.  They are tempos we are meant to groove.

Which, of course, is going to take a lot of practice.  Trial and error.  Discipline and planning.  Finding how much sleep we need, which foods drive our heart rate up, or our energy down. Discovering what exercise clears our minds and sharpens our memories.

It is important work.  Turns out, it is spirit work.  See what happens to your spirit if you were to be more intentional about your earth-bound soil-ness.

You might even be able to get to the place where you can read this blog at three in the afternoon without even once dozing off.