Discovery

Discovery:  I am a morning person.  No, really.

It seems to have taken thirty-odd years to find this out.  Well… that’s not really true.  When I was in primary school, my parents made a rule that permission to use our BBC Micro should rotate daily among the three children, but there was an exception that between 6am and 9am I always had first refusal.  So between the ages of about eight and about eleven, I would get up at 6am every day and code.  In my teens, of course, I reverted to the typical teenager pattern of staying up until three or four in the morning to code instead, and the old practice was forgotten.

I have recently been able to get a lift into work at seven, and that’s meant rising at six, and I’ve found how inexact my belief was that I dislike mornings.  It’s actually that I dislike getting up.  It’s dreary and icky and you might have been having a dream you didn’t want to leave, and you have to undergo the daily birth from your blanket cocoon into the cold and unwelcoming world.  So who can wonder that I was attracted to the idea of putting it off for a while?

But, praise Drogo, there is caffeine in the morning to focus your mind, there is stretching to unfurl yourself from your pupal state, and there is the promise of your inbox and newsfeeds to tempt you to your desk.  Now, though, the difficulty lies in getting up on days I don’t have to.  I believe it’ll make it harder to get up on ordinary days if I lie in.

I know some of you reading this have set daily practices in the mornings, such as saying the Office.  Whether or not I wanted to do that or anything like it, I was always impressed by anyone with the ability: my early mornings and late evenings have been the least organised parts of my days.  I’ve been getting a better handle on having the middle part focussed; it needs to spread to the rest of my life as well.