Early Riser Blues

This month, I started to teach my class in Fort Tryon Park again. It's a free taijiquan class I've offered for the past two (or three?) summers. As much as I love teaching, there's one thing about this class that I think I could do without. It's at 6:30 in the morning.
Actually, it makes sense to do it early. The qi in the park is clear, the birds are singing, the setting is serene. It's also good as the mind is clear in the morning also. It just really, really bites getting up at 5:45 so I can pull my clothes on and get there on time.
Recently, I've been thinking a lot about little inconveniences like this, and how they relate to life. I've come to realize that the Buddha Gautama was absolutely right; living involves a certain amount of suffering.
Nothing is free, and everything worthwhile involves some inconvenience, suffering, elbow grease, whatever you want to call it. We all know that this is true. However, knowing something and actualizing it are two different things. Otherwise, we'd all act in our best interests all the time, no complaining. The reality is, however, that we do complain. We do want to stay snug in bed rather than go for an early run; we do want to drink that extra beer rather than stay sober to drive home, we do want to eat the pint of ice cream rather than the fruit.
This is the heart of procrastination, what Buddha included in his First Noble Truth about suffering; separation from what one wants is suffering, and having what one doesn't want is also suffering. Who wants to get up before six a.m. to do taiji? This morning, aside from myself, just one. And a skunk, but I think it was already in the park.
Of course, people do realize that a certain amount of discipline is necessary in daily life, otherwise nothing would get done. But I wonder; how much of this 'getting done' is still a kind of avoidance? Working hard to change the outside world to our liking only to wind up with yet other circumstances that we don't like? Circumstances that through our engineering, we've actually brought about? Like hamsters on the wheel, we spin and spin, moving out feet as rapidly as possible, yet not going anywhere.
Non-activity isn't the answer either, of course. To be human is to work. Otherwise, we'd starve. So what's a person to do?
It would seem that the thing to do is to accept that life has its moments we'd rather not have. To deal with the snow on the street, and the sun during the dog days of summer. We have to accept that early morning is the best time to rise to exercise, and that tedium is necessarily a part of mastering some process, be that taiji or stamp collecting.
Embrace the unpleasant. You'll feel so much better after.