Mornings Sorted, Well, Sort Of

If you have been reading this blog since it started (and thank you if you have), then you would be well aware of my issue with mornings. Sometimes I think if I met a genie, it might be one of my three wishes to become a morning person. But alas, I just do love those lie-ins and I am not the most, um, pleasant person in the morning.

Last June a great friend of mine who lives in California met me in New York for a trip. We shared a room each night and after a few days she revealed that she finally believed that I wasn't a morning person. She was also nice enough to shower first each day and give me those precious 15 minutes of extra sleep. (All the more impressive that she had the eastbound jetlag that should make it more difficult to rise in the morning.)

To be honest, I had just given up on mornings entirely. But then I realized there is one circumstance when I can rise early: when I have a lot of work to do.

Work has been very busy for me lately, which isn't actually a bad thing, as I've been given the opportunity to so some interesting things. But faced with the very real possibility of needing to stay late at the office most nights I decided that I'd prefer to rise right after the Hub in the early morning and just get going with my day.

There are certain interesting aspects to this new routine. Like the fact that commuting early and getting in before most colleagues actually allows my grumpiness to melt away faster since I don't need to talk to too many people and the commute is actually less stressful. I am also a surprisingly productive worker between the hours of 8 a.m. - 12 p.m. -- I can get more done in those four hours than I can get done during an equal amount of time in the afternoon.

The caveat is that I still can't rise early to do something fun at home -- sleep always wins -- so when I am getting up early it's got to be about inescapable work.

But what's most curious to me is the fact that better use of my mornings has been something I've wanted to change so badly about myself for a long time. And progress has been painfully slow. But when I really needed to change, it wasn't hard in the slightest: I just did it. Perhaps there's a lesson in that?

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All Four Seasons

We can all be very impatient. We want things to happen fast, adjustments to take no time at all and for it all to be easy. But the good stuff often takes some time.

My Aunt Donna once said to me that it takes four seasons to get used to something new. She was talking at the time about moving to another country (she was an expat too, in the Netherlands), but I often think of her words whenever I am dealing with a change of any sort, an experience or a difference. A new job, a move of house, mourning a loss.

After all, a year, even with all of its seasons and changes of light and temperature isn't really a long time in the scheme of our lives. I'm not sure where we get the idea that it is. When entering adulthood we've in fact spent at least 12 or 13 years in education - if not 17 or 18 - preparing to go out and get a job and live on our own. So why should we be surpised when six months into our first job we still don't know what we're doing?

But I remember feeling that way. Now, when I start a new job or role I know it will take at least a year to get used to it and many years to become competent at it (if ever). Maybe it's one of those lessons of adulthood that only becomes apparent over time, like the much quoted: the more you know, the more you realize you don't know. Because clearly, when I was 14 there was nothing I didn't know.

I wish I could be more cognizant of this yearly rule as my impatience surfaces time and again. Three or six months often seems like so long and yet whenever I reach that year mark I look back and see so clearly how little time it actually was (only one season, or maybe even two!).

My Aunt Donna was a writer. She didn't write books, but she wrote emails as if they were excerpts from them, and the way she spoke had the same expressiveness. Her words about the four seasons will always be a reminder to me of the time things actually take, but also the importance of experiencing life in the way you would when welcoming in each changing new season.

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