To Hurkle-Durkle Or Not To Hurkle-Durkle?

For someone perpetually online, I'm not always online in the places that put me in the know.

Take this example. I was recently dining with my former newspaper editor while visiting Wyoming, and she was telling me about the joys of retirement.

Being a newspaper woman through and through, she still reads with a voracious appetite, and she brought up a particularly on-topic article she'd seen about hurkle-durkling.

I started this post by mentioning my lack of knowledge about some of these things, and this was a good illustration: Here was my former newspaper editor boss, in her 60s, explaining to me something that the youths apparently know from countless TikToks about it. To be fair, she was getting her news the old-fashioned way: from the newspaper. Which made me feel better about the whole thing, and reminded me that generally, I find it somewhat annoying that there's a whole subset of journalism that's just interpreting what folks on social media are talking about.

Undoubtedly useful, and surely popular, but it kind of makes my head hurt that it's even necessary at all.

Back to the hurkle-durkle of it all.

Do you hurkle-durkle? This old Scottish phrase is the name given to waking up but not getting out of bed.

I don't really hurkle-durkle. But I find myself caught up in its allure. It seems indulgent, in a luxurious kind of way. It also runs totally counter to myriad other life hacks about productivity. Or so it seems.

But the real appeal of it, the article says, is less about giving into our laziest impulses and more about prioritizing our own time for self-care and reflection, whatever that looks like for us.

The experts advise us not to squander the time by doing stuff that makes us worse off. Don't turn to your email first thing if you're the type to become stressed out over the state of your inbox. (Same goes for social media, if you're the sort to get worked up over that sort of thing.) But, they say, if firing off a few quick emails from bed helps clear space for the rest of your day, it's a good use of your hurkle-durkle time.

After she told me of the term and what it means, I tried to think of how I'd hurkle-durkle.

My low-hanging-fruit answer would be for it to become a time for journaling or morning pages. Or reading fiction. Things that I want to do more of, in general, to help strengthen my writing life. I think it's because I struggle to make time for that in my days, and given my desire to have a healthier writing life, that poses a problem.

I don't actually think hurkle-durkling is the answer to that particular problem, but it got me thinking about the concept of not rushing out of bed. Which feels good, if a bit counterintuitive, when thinking about productivity and how the get the most out of my day.

Not sure I will become a practitioner, but the concept is too interesting (and too fun to say) not to give it some serious thought.