Waking early

This summer I find myself waking easily around 6 a.m., 6:30 at the latest, and I marvel as I begin the day how easy it has become to arise early.

This is a fairly remarkable thing to me. For years, I’ve tried to become more of an early-morning person. On January 1st of 2010, it was my singular resolution: I was going to try to be out of bed earlier in the morning. And by earlier, at that point, I meant before eight o’clock on weekends.

But it’s never been something that comes naturally to me. I get up early on school days or work days because I have to, but given the leeway of weekends or vacations, I used to always drowse until well after dawn, even in the winter when “after dawn” meant well past seven o’clock.

This summer that’s changed, though. It may be a sign of aging; I’ve always heard that it’s easier for older people to wake up early. It may be a sign that my children are more self-reliant; at the ages of 10 and 13, they simply don’t wear me out on a daily basis the way they once did.

Or it could be a combination of these factors. Because the fact is that it couldn’t have come at a better time. I’ve started waking earlier just as the kids are reaching the teen or pre-teen years at which young people typically start sleeping later. (Actually, Tim sleeps ‘til after nine; Holly wakes and then likes to read in bed in the morning. She has no idea what a wonderful luxury of childhood that is.)

So I feel richly rewarded as well as a little self-congratulatory this summer. Even with no firm morning commitments – that is, nothing more time-sensitive than trying to get a few hours of writing done before lunch so that the kids and I can do something fun in the afternoon – I’m still up before 6:30. The summer air is fresh and cool in the early morning. Even the dog is still asleep; I write my Morning Pages, put on my running shoes, and then wake her when I’m ready to head out the door for a run.

And then when I’m done with my workout 45 minutes later, the kids are still asleep, and Rick is heading off to work. I can make breakfast and drink my coffee and read the paper and even check my email and start my work day before anyone else is awake, before anyone needs anything from me.

It’s funny to me to think how long I tried to force this change, and how then it just happened on its own. I don’t necessarily think there’s a uniform lesson to be learned from that. For example, I don’t really believe that if I just stop attempting weight loss, I’ll lose five pounds, or that if I stop trying to improve my writing, I’ll find an acceptance letter from the New Yorker in the mailbox.

Still, there may be a small lesson in it. I keep thinking of that Buddhist phrase: “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” Only in this case, it’s “when the subject is ready, the habit will take hold.” Maybe I really needed all that extra sleep, all those years. Maybe now there’s something different about me that is more interested in the quiet of the early morning than the chance to rest. I can’t take much credit, but I’m finally an earlier riser. And just as I imagined, it feels wonderful.

How early is early?

One of the first lessons I took in as I began my informal study of Thoreau this week was how much he valued the early morning hours. To hear Thoreau tell it, we could all be much more exalted, efficient, morally well-served and aesthetically blessed individuals if only we took better advantage of the early morning hours by starting our day earlier.

“The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour,” he wrote. “Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. … All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere.”

Reading these words, I became an instant convert. “That’s it!” I thought to myself. “To take another step toward the person I want to be…I just need to be up earlier in the morning!”

But then I remembered something. I already get up at 5:30. Just how early did Thoreau mean? For that matter, just how early did he himself arise?

If I continue with my 2011 goal of becoming more familiar with his work, maybe I’ll be able to deduce an answer to that question. Even if he doesn’t name the time at which he rises, I imagine there are clues in his writing. Where he so often focuses on observations of nature, there must be numerous passages in which I could match his description of available light to the season to figure out whether he was bathing in Walden Pond – which the same passage referred to as his first activity of the day – at, say, 7 a.m. as opposed to 4 a.m.

On weekdays, I set my alarm for 5:30 so that I have time to write my 1000 words of Morning Pages, per the method of writing instructor and author Julia Cameron, and ride my stationary bike for 45 minutes before the kids wake up and need breakfast. (Actually, the image of my kids waking before I’ve had a chance to finish exercising and demanding breakfast right away is something of a mental relic from when they were babies. These days I have to nudge them into wakefulness several times and urge them to ingest something in time to catch the bus. So it’s not a matter of them being demanding, just the demands of the school day and its time-specific schedule.) When I’m done biking on weekday mornings, I wake the kids, make their breakfast, give the dog her breakfast, let the dog out and back in, and then head out to the barnyard to give the cows and sheep their breakfast, with the goal of getting back to the house in time to eat something myself before I have to hurry to catch a shower and still get Holly out to her bus on time. (Tim takes responsibility himself for being on time to catch the middle school bus, but I still have to ensure that all the pieces are in place to get him out there: food, vitamin, teeth-brushing reminder, lunch packed and ready to go.)

Nonetheless, Thoreau’s description of the value of greeting the dawn seduced me momentarily. So that’s what I need to do!, I thought to myself. Thoreau did not have children who needed breakfast, nor did he have livestock to feed, and he certainly didn’t have a schoolbus schedule to comply with. He also didn’t feel obligated to spend 45 minutes on the stationary bike; he spent much of the day walking through the woods of Concord and probably had no need of supplementary exercise.

But all of this is really beside the point. Just how early would I have to set my alarm for to gain even more benefits of the morning than I already do? Maybe 4:30. Objectively, I can imagine that in the heart of the summer I would witness breathtaking sunrises if I were up at that hour, and surely reap some of the rewards of this greater exposure to the natural world that Thoreau espouses. At this time of winter, though, I don’t think 4:30 would feel all that much different from 5:30. It would still be cold, and dark as pitch, and I’d still be drowsy.

And so for now I don’t plan to recalibrate my mornings. A year ago, I wrote of the resolution to get up earlier on weekends, when unlike weekdays I don’t really have to. That resolution succeeded somewhat. It’s hard for me to resist the temptation to bask in sleepy splendor on Saturday and Sunday mornings until about 7, or more specifically until the 7 a.m. news headlines have been read on NPR, but I’m usually up by 7:10. That’s a whole hour earlier than was typical before I made that resolution a year ago.

It’s a start, and for now it will have to do. I’m pragmatic enough to acknowledge that rising earlier wouldn’t make me able to write like Thoreau or even to see the world through the perspective of Thoreau, and at the moment I don’t feel like the hour my alarm goes off is a worthwhile target for self-improvement. To me, 5:30 on weekdays feels early enough, and I’ll just have to seek extra self-improvement after the sun comes up to compensate for whatever I’m missing out on.

Early to rise

It’s the kind of accomplishment that matters only to me, but to me it matters a lot. Somehow in the three and a half weeks since school vacation began, I’ve managed to get at least partway to a goal that has stymied me for years: resetting my internal alarm clock so that I can arise earlier even when I don’t have to.

During the school year, it’s not a problem, at least from Monday to Friday. I set the alarm early – 5:45 AM – because I have to. What gets me out of bed is not a sense of wakefulness or alertness but a sense of necessity: if I don’t get up right then, I won’t be ready for the basic requirements of the day, like getting the kids to school on time.

But for years, it’s been a perennial goal of mine to train myself to get up early even when I don’t need to. I knew that by letting myself doze until 7:30 or 8 on weekend mornings and vacation mornings, I was depriving myself of the much-needed opportunity for greater productivity. And yet I always had the same rationale: sleeping late is such a harmless pleasure. It doesn’t cause weight gain or high cholesterol. It doesn’t kill off brain cells. It doesn’t cost money. It doesn’t hurt the environment. Allowing myself to lounge in bed felt like the one thing I could do that didn’t cause damage to anyone or anything.

And after all the years when my children were really young and sleeping late wasn’t an option for me, I felt like I’d earned this harmless privilege by the time they finally – finally! – reached the age when they either slept late themselves or were able to keep themselves busy even if I was still in bed. Saturday mornings are the reward for years of maternal sleep deprivation, I told myself.

At the same time, it always gave me the sense that I was unnecessarily handicapping myself. I don’t mean to sound like a frenetic, type A person. I’m not a masochist when it comes to productivity: I just always have things I want to get done, and there were so many weekend mornings in the past when I would catch myself still cleaning up from breakfast well after ten a.m. and think, “If I’d been up at six, I would have already exercised and made that marinade for dinner and returned those emails. I’d be ahead of the game if I hadn’t let myself sleep ‘til eight.”

I even did research to try to change my ways. I actually googled “How to get up earlier.” But the answers I found were too obvious to be of any help: Go to bed earlier. (Well of course.) Start making yourself arise five minutes earlier a day until you get to the time you are striving for. (I couldn’t manage even five minutes.) I was looking for a magic answer, preferably something involving self-hypnosis or an inexpensive herbal remedy.

Instead, I focused on what could be gained. I thought of how I would feel if by the time the kids were ready for breakfast, I’d already exercised, dressed and showered. I thought about how maybe it would allow me to take some time later in the day to just sit and read the paper. I thought of all the ways I could use that extra hour – the one first thing in the morning, but also the one it gained me later in the day when I’d already accomplished some of what I wanted to for any given day.

So I redoubled my resolve, and strangely, I started to notice a difference. This summer vacation the kids are at home and I’m self-employed; there’s no compelling reason to get our day off to an early start. No one needs to be anywhere. But I found as school vacation began that I was awake at 6:30, so rather than rationalizing why it was okay to sleep another hour, I got up. And then I did it the next day. And the next.

I remembered that popular maxim about how it takes three weeks to instill a habit. “Just do this for three weeks,” I told myself. “Then it won’t seem so hard.”

It’s been a little more than three weeks, and indeed, it doesn’t seem so hard. Not most of the time. Yesterday I blew it, having been up late on Saturday night and consequently slept until eight on Sunday morning, but as my mother commented when I fretted that I’d blown my lead, “I don’t think there’s a national registry for getting-up-at-6:30 streaks.” This was a reference to my daily running streak, for which there is a national registry, one I can remain listed on only until I miss my daily mile. My mother made a good point, though: like a diet, blowing it one day wasn’t a big deal.

And indeed, I managed to get back on track. I was up just a little past 6:30 this morning and out running just a little after 7. (This summer’s notable heat wave has provided another incentive for me: it makes a huge difference if I can get my daily run out of the way before the sun is hitting the roadway full force.) So I’m back on track for now, and feeling good about it. I’m past three weeks and while this doesn’t exactly feel like a habit the way, say, my daily run does, it feels like something I’ve proved to myself I can do.

Earlier this year I came across this quotation from Ben Franklin: You will find the key to success under the alarm clock.” Gradually, I’m starting to see exactly what he means. I just need to keep remembering to set that alarm clock, and the success – or at least the chance at it -- will be right there waiting for me to unlock it, one morning at a time, day after day.