You Should Wake Up Early

There’s something in the air in the early mornings. I don’t know if it’s the quiet or if it’s the cold. I don’t know if it’s the idea that the sun hasn’t even risen yet, let alone your roommates or neighbors, or if it’s just the idea that the new day holds a multitude of possibilities and you have first pick because you’re the only one awake.

I woke up at 4:16 this morning, Sunday. Last night I had a restless dream that I was hiking an expedition in the mountains and Tom Hanks was the old man in the group, leading us along across vast ice sheets with the calm likable guidance that it seems only Tom Hanks can give. Regardless I woke up shortly afterward and while most mornings I feel the urge to stay in bed for at least another few hours, this morning I woke up and I felt like that was enough.

As I went out on the deck for a cigarette, the cool moist air hitting my face and the peace of the early morning struck me. There were still stars in the sky and as I sat there thinking about a girl, the articles I needed to write, and the things I needed to do today I realized I was alone at that time and place. It wasn’t a bad kind of alone. It was more like a peaceful alone. It was the kind of alone you feel when you’re hiking through the woods on a fall afternoon or the kind of alone you feel as you’re staring into the early morning coals of a campfire with a cup of shitty Folgers camp coffee in your hand.

As I sat there thinking, a car pulled up to the adjacent building in the condo complex and dropped a girl off. I realized she was just getting home after, likely, a long night of Halloween drinking. I thought about how she would be sleeping for the next seven or eight hours, through the sunrise, those of which tend to be beautiful this time of year, and probably through lunchtime. I couldn’t help but think that that sounded like a waste of a day.

The point I’m trying to make is that there’s something special about the mornings, especially the early mornings. There’s something about sipping coffee on the porch before the sun comes up that clears the cobwebs out of your head.

I remember reading an article a month or two ago about how a lot of artists and creative people tend to wake up early and I think there may be something to that. There’s something to waking up before the chaos of the spinning world and the bustle of society begins in the morning that gives you time to think.

I’m sitting here in my chair with my laptop and the clock says 6:02 am. The sun still hasn’t come up but there’s the soft wave of music floating to my ears and my hands are quietly typing out this diatribe about waking up early and the only thing I can think is that I feel comfortable here. I feel utterly comfortable with not having the world to deal with quite yet, with not worrying what my friends or family are doing today, and with the soft light of the lamp above me casting it’s glow over the shadow of my hands on the keyboard.

There’s no one to impress at six in the morning. There are no meetings with work and there’s no reason to hurry. In these few hours before the world wakes up there’s time. Everything is slow and everything is quiet and there’s time.

I know that soon the sun will peak up from the east horizon pouring an orange light over the clouds and I will remark at how nice that looks and I may even go out to the meadow by my house to take a picture of the sunrise, but for now, with the dark and the stars and the possibility of everything I feel a peace that I’d have a hard time recognizing as I’m stuck behind traffic in the middle of the day.

Give me my mornings. You can have the rest of my day, just give me my mornings.