Since my teenage years, I've wanted to be a morning person. Two reasons: 1) I have a romanticized image of morning people drinking steaming coffee while watching the sunrise and composing great literature and 2) The white-hot disapproval morning people exhibit toward the sleeping habits of night owls makes me squirm.
Morning people, because they know I couldn't possibly know any better, let me go on believing in the morning person dream of relaxation and productivity before the world awakes. And though they claim to not pass judgement on the hours I keep, I can tell they believe only a sloth would lie in bed until 9 a.m.
For decades I have believed that I am a morning person stuck in a night owl's body. I have struggled against my nature, periodically setting my alarm to ring me out of bed at ungodly a.m. hours with the unhappy result of slapping the snooze button until 10 or getting up and crawling through my day like a zombie. These experiments end with me patting my self on the back for giving it a good try and returning to my slovenly ways of waking whenever I please.
But then I remind my self that it took me 40 years to develop the habit of making up my bed every day, a task most people master by the time they are 10. At 10, I had the good sense to know that making up my bed was a huge waste of time since I would be messing it up again that night. At 40, I wanted to quit being sensible.
At age 44, still holding on to the hope that I can successfully transform into the person that I know I am inside, I've had an epiphany. In order to be a morning person, I must give up being a night owl. Staying up until midnight and rising at the cock-a-doodle rooster crow will never produce the results I seek. That's a place of limbo and bleak identity confusion.
Since coming to this realization and changing my ways, I've had another epiphany. The early bird misses the sunrise because she's doing the laundry and making the coffee.
Morning people, because they know I couldn't possibly know any better, let me go on believing in the morning person dream of relaxation and productivity before the world awakes. And though they claim to not pass judgement on the hours I keep, I can tell they believe only a sloth would lie in bed until 9 a.m.
For decades I have believed that I am a morning person stuck in a night owl's body. I have struggled against my nature, periodically setting my alarm to ring me out of bed at ungodly a.m. hours with the unhappy result of slapping the snooze button until 10 or getting up and crawling through my day like a zombie. These experiments end with me patting my self on the back for giving it a good try and returning to my slovenly ways of waking whenever I please.
But then I remind my self that it took me 40 years to develop the habit of making up my bed every day, a task most people master by the time they are 10. At 10, I had the good sense to know that making up my bed was a huge waste of time since I would be messing it up again that night. At 40, I wanted to quit being sensible.
At age 44, still holding on to the hope that I can successfully transform into the person that I know I am inside, I've had an epiphany. In order to be a morning person, I must give up being a night owl. Staying up until midnight and rising at the cock-a-doodle rooster crow will never produce the results I seek. That's a place of limbo and bleak identity confusion.
Since coming to this realization and changing my ways, I've had another epiphany. The early bird misses the sunrise because she's doing the laundry and making the coffee.
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5 comments:
I am a morning person, at least I am each night before I fall asleep. Reality changes the next day, and my three kids REALLY are morning people.
Woe is us, Janna.
My four children were once morning people. They have now succumbed to the teen years.
I am a night owl but never been in a position to sleep in til 9 on a regular basis. These days I am gradually changing and going to bed early and consequently getting up early as well.
Lol, I am not a morning person either and just like you, always wished I was. :)
I am most definitely not a morning person.
When my maternal grandparents first got married, for the first couple of weeks, my grandmother would get up, making my grandfather his breakfast before he headed off to work. She'd chatter pretty much straight off from getting out of bed. Then he asked her to let him get breakfast himself. He was quite content not speaking to anyone for the first couple of hours in a day.
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