Your Morning Alarms

By : Alifah Fatin K.

JurnalPost.com - Every morning, I would turn off my alarm and wake up from bed after two rings or even more. I have come to realize that it is not simply the matter of when the alarm will ring, but more towards the quality of its sound, the gap in between the rings, and how early I sleep. No need to frown though, we won’t be specifically talking much about the literal alarm in this essay, but more to the ‘alarms’ a person can find in many parts of their life.

How many times in life have we set our sole focus in a timeline? Positioning ‘when’ as the center of our goals; you want to graduate at the age of 22, you will be a senior employee by 25 years old, you are going to have an established business before reaching 30 years old, and more. If not by ourselves, perhaps pushed by the community we live in; your grandma wants you to get married at the age of 26, your friends urge you to buy that property before reaching 45 years old, your old classmates plan a reunion for you to attend in 2027, and others. Each time the interval between the targets ends, an ‘alarm’ that you or your people have set may ring. Some alarms can sound louder than others and probably cannot be ‘snoozed’ as simply as clicking a button on your phone. It may leave you unable to really feel anything else, depending on how it rings.

In a busy world where everything seems quick and competitive, it is not a wonder that humans seem to lose their chance in ‘feeling’ something. Sometimes it pushes us to end up missing out or lacking on things. But would it be one’s fault for refusing to ‘slow down’ though? Afterall, our current society appears to possess the tendency of associating it with laziness, incompetence, or even weakness. Have we ever really considered that a human can progress differently? What if we all ‘sleep’ distinctly?

Born into a multicultural family, I learned one thing similar from both Javanese Language and Sumbawanese Language (two of many traditional languages from Indonesia) in terms of making haste, despite not being super fluent in any of them. In Javanese Language, I learned the proverb ‘alon-alon asal kelakon.’ I have yet to find a perfect English equivalent of the proverb, but ‘slowly, but sure’ seems to have captured the essence of it. Meanwhile, in the Sumbawanese Language, I learned the proverb ‘mara bawi lantar teming’ which (if we break down) may refer to ‘like a pig crashing a cliff,’ referring to a hastiness that results in an unpleasant situation. To me at least, both proverbs suggest a message for a person to see an interval as a focus, not simplifying a milestone to its timing.

Maybe it has never really been a matter of when the alarm would ring, but rather the people that I have set the alarm with and how I see the interval. No matter how many times I have failed in waking up by the time the alarm rings, I hope I wake up in the right way with enough good sleep within the ‘gap.’ Failure can come with regret, but why ignore the possible factor that prevents you from sleeping earlier? Or probably the fact that you didn’t set the alarm by your own will? But we are not just talking about sleep in its literal sense, aren’t we?

How about you? How do you feel about your morning alarms?

Tentang Penulis: Alifah Fatin K. – Mahasiswa Program Studi Magister Sastra dan Budaya Kontemporer di Loughborough, Inggris. Beberapa karya berbahasa Indonesia dan Inggris yang ia tulis telah dimuat dalam antologi dan kanal online.

Informasi Kontak: @alifahfatin.bsky.official (Bluesky), @alifahfatinnisa (Instagram), Alifah Fatin K. (LinkedIn)