Voluntarily and Happily

But unexpected.

On a cold April morning in Strasbourg, it hit me: I loved being up early, before everyone else was, at a time I could have sworn only insane people or shift workers were up at. But there I was, voluntarily and happily, a morning person.

I woke up and was the first to leave the house to be on time in front of a specialty coffee place that was opening at 8 a.m. to make sure that I’d find a spot. As I was walking towards the cafe, I realized that I had become the kind of person that enjoyed leaving her warm bed to get dressed in silence, walk for eight minutes to a cafe to give a hand to the Gen Z French barista setting up the tables outside.

I loved those minutes walking, feeling a bit cold, seeing only a handful of people in the streets and the trucks that were cleaning them. I loved that the first person I spoke with that day was the barista who spoke with a strong and charming French accent. And I loved writing my morning pages with a cup of their batch brew, listening to the trams coming and going and FIP, the French radio station, on a real radio. I just couldn’t stop smiling and indulging in that apparently simple and uneventful moment. After writing my pages, I started reading my old New Yorker issue, and only after this did I take a look at my emails, Slack, and whatever else real work was having in store for me.

A perfect morning

By the time it was 9:30, I was walking back to meet the rest of the house who had taken longer to get up that day.

As I write all of this for you, I easily travel back to the Omnino Cafe in front of the Saint-Pierre-le-Vieux Church, reliving everything and feeling the wave of joy come over me.

How did this happen?

I’m naturally drawn to things that are counterintuitive, and this was one of them: wake up at an ungodly early time and your life will get better. You’ll not only get more stuff done, but your relationship with life and time will get better.

I’d tried this for enough days to get a sense that there was something to it beyond the extra hours of quiet time to do work before the rest of the world was getting up and sending emails or, even worse, calling. But it didn’t stick and I went back to my preference for sleeping as much as possible in the morning and dreading waking up.

Jump ahead a few years and enter babies, the catalyst in most people’s lives that test if they are morning people or not. A dog does this too, I’ve heard. Having kids taught me many things, but to the point of waking up early, it was during this period of three to five years that I had the most experiments with sleep and waking up times. What I’ve learned is that it’s all constantly changing, that it doesn’t matter if I’m a morning person or a night owl, the kids will do what they want, and I have to roll with it.

But then came the forties and a curiosity to learn about how I might not only live a long life, but a long and healthy life. That’s when I learned that hormones run the show in the background, and so I gave myself a challenge and started waking up at 6 a.m. as a way to regulate my HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) axis. This is the axis that runs your stress and recovery cycle, with cortisol doing most of the work and almost everything else in the body taking its cues from it.

So starting in March, there I was up at six in front of my red light screen, meditating for ten minutes and then ready for my morning pages at six fifteen and done with my morning routine by seven. I loved it.