It’s 5:08 AM Thursday morning, which means it’s four days after I adopted yet another weekly resolution to lose weight and exactly twelve hours since I dropped it. And it it is exactly 8 minutes into the beginning of a resolution that I hope will actually make a difference in my life. Today, I have decided to become a morning person.
I have always been a creature of the night. When I was in my twenties it was when life began. In my thirties, it was when everyone else went to sleep, and I could work on projects or have the remote to myself. But as I have begun to seek out a creative life, I have found the need to create a new ritual.
Earlier in my endeavor, I was able to fit writing and sketching into my normal routine at the end of the day, but as holiday rituals begin to crowd my ever-expanding to-do list with cooking and cleaning and concerts, the ritual of writing has become harder to observe. Now, I know that if you can fit fifteen minutes of TV into your life, you can do something useful with that fifteen minutes. Lately, however, my midnight moxie has been been AWOL, and I’ve been nodding off – and not writing – in front of the tube more often than I’d care to admit.
It is true that the more you write, the more you write. It is even more true that when you start letting life get between you and your writing, the divide gets wider very quickly. And, as tired as life makes me, for some reason, not writing made me more tired. So last night after the kids were down, instead of falling asleep on the couch next to the Big Guy, I announced I was going to bed.
And now, at five AM, I’m starting a new resolution to make morning writing a ritual, and with each word and visit to the altar of creativity, it becomes not only more enjoyable, but more sacred in my life.