Finding time
The myths and magic of being a morning person
In my early 30s I decided I wanted to “live according to my own rhythms.” I got rid of my scale and my alarm clock. In time, I’d gained a little weight and fallen into an easy schedule, rising around 7 or 8 each morning and going to bed around 11 pm or midnight. My days were flexible, so I was able to find time to exercise, write, play video games, whatever I felt like doing whenever I felt like doing them. Even on weekends, I rarely slept in. That was notable among my friends whose schedules seemed to slide around the calendar, dictated more by their evening adventures than any natural rhythm. Late nights, sleeping until noon. I never managed to do either with much success. I simply wasn’t wired that way.
Then, in my late 30s, I had a child, and for many years, my sleep and waking belonged to someone else. My child, it should be noted, would be a contender for World’s Worst Sleeper, should such a contest exist. Well into late childhood, they struggled to fall asleep, struggled to stay asleep, forced their way into our bed in the middle of the night, and woke up far earlier than they should. At 9 and a half, they still insist that someone be quietly situated in the adjacent room so they can fall asleep, and still occasionally climb their much-too-big-for-this body — all limbs and bony ends — into our bed, causing the dog to growl and us grown-ups to moan.
The loss of sleep was troubling, but worse was the lack of time to call my own. I wanted to write again, to journal, and in the unlikely event there was more time, exercise, practice meditation, stare out the window with a meaningful look in my eyes. And it had to be in the morning, because, as I’ll explain in a bit more detail shortly, I’m truly useless at the end of the day. But my good intentions were thwarted night after night, so I ignored the wail of my alarm clock most mornings in order to get the sleep I’d lost along the way and waited a bit longer for my new routine to emerge.
And, finally, it did. My child learned to stay in their bed most nights. And I found myself going to bed and getting up earlier, often waking before my alarm, set for 5:40, had the chance to sound. And now it is as though I was always a morning person, waiting for the right circumstances to emerge.
In our productivity-obsessed culture, there are few behaviors more celebrated than that of rising before the crack of dawn. From an early age I was taught that the early bird catches the worm, a phrase which implies, somewhat menacingly, that there are not enough worms to go around. We speak admiringly of businesses that go into production while the rest of the world sleeps, and credit the success of athletes to their practice of rising early to train. When I mention to others that I frequently get up before 6 am to journal and write, my admission is often met by exclamations of admiration. Such discipline! Such productivity! “I wish I could do that.” And for a moment I bathe in the warm glow of moral superiority that, it turns out, I have no right to claim.
For I am merely acting upon my natural rhythm. There’s even a word for it: chronotype. There are four chronotypes, all told, and they’ve been given cute animal names along the way. I was, for years, a Bear, with a natural schedule that followed the sun, able to straddle both mornings (not too early) and evenings (not too late). I would fit in breaks throughout the day to exercise, rest, or think. How wonderful, in retrospect, to be in tune with the world and its rhythms, to be able to inhabit both morning and evening without suffering.
Though, in truth, I’d rather be a wolf (aka a night owl) like my husband, who gets a burst of energy in the evenings that I find completely unfathomable. After a full day of work and parenting and whatnot, he regularly stays up late catching up on work, watching movies, reading, and who knows what else. There seems to be no cap on this. Sometimes he comes to bed at 11, sometimes midnight, sometimes later. If I were like him, I imagine, I could write for hours every night instead of for the hour or so I eke out in the morning before the day and its demands put an end to it.
But, no. I’m already struggling to form sentences after wrapping up my work, and that’s before dinner, homework, chores, and whatever else needs to be done before bed. I find myself in bed as early as 9, trying to hold my eyes open long enough to read a few pages before the book I’m reading comes crashing down on my face, letting me know I’ve lost the battle yet again.
All of which makes me, in chronotypal terms, a Lion. Most energetic in the morning, I start the day clear and bright eyed and immediately start driving everyone mad, especially on weekends, when my desire to front load the day runs headlong into my family’s own, quite different inclinations. On the other hand, for evening plans I need a pep talk and a lot of preparation to get myself out the door. Even TV has become too stimulating for me, which is one reason I’ve more or less stopped watching.
Consistency is important with any routine. Anyone vaguely versed in sleep hygiene will tell you this. If you wish to follow a certain sleep schedule, even one that goes along with your natural grain, you should go to bed and get up around the same time, give or take an hour, every day, not just weekdays.
Let us pause a moment to whisper a prayer for the poor Dolphin, incurable insomniac, bobbing on the waves of waking and sleeping, incapable of sticking to any fixed pattern. They can only dream of acclimating their restless bodies to a schedule so they can, like me, more or less ignore their alarm clocks.
Ah, and here, too, a whiff of virtuosity creeps in. For it is one thing to get up at 5:30 am on a Tuesday, but quite another to do it on a Saturday. For the record, I often take that extra hour on weekends, sleeping “in” to 6:30 and occasionally 7. On vacations I extend my 8 hours of nightly rest to 9 or 10, snoozing away until 8. But no matter what time I get up in the morning, I can no longer manage to stay up past 10.
So, yes, rising early has required a bit of self-discipline and training, but the goal itself went along with what nature gave me. What ought to be admired, if anything, is not the hour at which I carve out time for myself, but that I do so — and that, once secured, I spend it wisely.
One might imagine early mornings to be blissfully free from distraction. And to some extent that is true. There is an inherent peacefulness to pre-dawn. In my cozy Brooklyn apartment, I sit at our living room window, which offers a sprawling view of the Manhattan, downtown Brooklyn, and Queens skylines. The lights in distant buildings are mostly off. The streets below are mostly still, with only the occasional car or person making their way. My dog continues his nightly slumber at my side, asking little more than the occasional reassuring pet. My child and spouse request nothing other than to be left alone to sleep another hour or two. I tiptoe about, careful not to disturb the stillness with my toilet flushing and coffee making.
Before long, the sun begins its daily ascent in the east, casting a glowing light that rises from the base of the glass skyscrapers, gradually making its way to their peaks before filling the entire sky with the light of day. And I sit, pen in hand, silent and awed in my good fortune to catch this magical moment before it’s gone.
And still, I can hear the twin sirens of productivity and distraction beckoning to me. Email, weather, calendar, shopping, to say nothing of news and social media. When you have only an hour, maybe 90 minutes tops, you become keenly aware of how quickly these things will gobble it up, leaving you dissatisfied and regretful as you start your day in earnest.
I learned the hard way, albeit quickly, that preserving this time for myself required not only the discipline of peeling myself out of bed in the cold darkness, when an extra hour or two of sleep was so tantalizingly possible, but also a ruthlessness towards all forms of distraction. I’ve blocked all the apps on my phone from being used until 7am, lest I fall down a social media k-hole and squander my daily moment of zen. When my child wanders into the living room before my time is over, I practically growl in warning: Don’t talk to me until 7.
Other distractions come from within. For a time I tried to make my time as productive as humanly possible. Meditation. Tarot cards. Journaling. Writing. Oh, and some exercise too. If I broke each effort into 20 minute chunks I could check them all off before the sun rose. Pure foolishness. By sticking to just writing, the time feels not only more productive than if I tried to use the time productively, but something more ineffable: expansive.
A couple years ago, we had the windows replaced from our 14th floor apartment. Because we live in an older high rise, our windows have frames and sashes, as well as the mandatory bars that prevent small children and pets from tumbling to their deaths. For a couple hours, all this was removed, revealing both how truly large a space our windows occupied and how thin the barrier was that separated us from oblivion.
The openings where our windows had been gave a feeling of vastness to our small apartment. We stood there, dumbstruck, taking it all in. Then, as if in a film, a red balloon that our child had collected from some birthday party or other, skittered lightly along the ceiling as it made its way towards the void, hesitated a moment at the threshold, before dipping under the sill and out into the great beyond.
This was the memory that sprang to mind as I contemplated what my mornings have, through trial and error, become for me: the briefest of opportunities to remove all that keeps us from experiencing how spacious and infinite time can feel, even when squeezed into the small space of an hour. The less we fill the time with, the larger and more magical it can become. But first, we need to find the time.
