Early to Bed, Early to Rise…
One of my earliest memories, although I may be mixing a few together, is of me and my mom taking a walk early in the morning in Kismet on Fire Island. I must have been only four or five. We end up having breakfast on the rooftop dining area of this restaurant in town where we can look out amongst a see of bungalow rooftops that are glowing in the morning sun. I remember my mom saying to me that we were early risers and that my dad and sister were not, and I took pride in that.
My father died when I was just nine years old, but my mom is still an early riser and my sister still prefers to get up late, although a new baby has put an end to any “preferences” for sleeping schedule, or I should say, any but the new baby’s. Somewhere along the line I was converted to the dark side and now it is a lot easier for me to get up late than early.
I really love the morning, there’s something really magical about that time of day between dawn and the time when the sun gets to bright to look at for more than a second. At least on sunny days, that is. But even if it isn’t sunny, the world just seems more fresh, real, even innocent. The early mornings are before the mad rush hours start, before the events of the day can start weighing you down, although with news coming from around the world, when it’s morning here, it’s well into the day in other areas that could be experiencing yet more bad news.
My problem, if you can call it that, is that I get involved in something at night, like writing a blog entry, reading discussion forums, watching a long movie, etc. and before I know it, it’s quite late. Maybe part of this is that at that late time my sleep-addled brain is working more slowly and so I just don’t notice the time go by. Whatever the reason, I always end up getting to bed really late, and so getting up really early is, if not impossible, at least painful.
I think a lot of this also has to do with the job you hold that controls most of our schedules. I’ve been lucky enough to have jobs where one’s daily schedule was not exactly written in stone. No time cards, no real tracking, and a great flexibility in terms of when one could get in. Coworkers in the past and present have gotten in as early as 7am and as late as noon, sometimes even later. Perhaps this has to do with the field in which I work being IT and web development and that coders normally keep somewhat unusual hours unless they work in a company that organizes lots of meetings attended by non-coders who work more regular hours. So, what this has resulted in, is that “routines” are hard to come by. When you have great flexibility, you, or at least I, tend to use that flexibility and come in later one day if I happen to have been up really late, or perhaps early if I wake up by chance and can’t fall back to sleep.
The only thing that has changed this to some extent for me is getting married, or I should say, moving in with my now wife. Although her job is not exactly strict when it comes to time either, at least in theory she has a time that she is supposed to be in by. If not for both that and the fact that I’ve either been driving her to work or to the metro stop for the past couple of years, I probably would be coming in at 10:30 or later every morning as I had been before I moved in with her.
Lately, though, I’ve been trying to get up a lot earlier. My rational that I tell myself is that if I can get up early and get to work early, I can also leave work early and get home with enough time to get a lot done before dinner, after which my motivation level to do much of anything other than sit in front of the computer or TV goes down dramatically! I should, I tell myself, be able to fall asleep a lot earlier, because I will be more tired from getting up so early! But sitting in front of the computer or TV does not take all that much energy, and so you have to rely on external stimuli to tell you when it’s time to go to sleep, not just whether you are feeling tired. I’ve had mixed results so far. I’ve been able to get up an hour or an hour and a half earlier than usual, but I’ve been getting to sleep at the most an hour earlier, but often only 30 minutes or less. So I’m just getting less sleep, which is no good either! I guess the real challenge will be to keep this up on the weekend when I don’t have to go to work. I just am afraid that sleeping several hours later on the weekend will just make it that much harder to readjust all over again every Monday.