Another addition to the Why I love… series, topics can and will be small and big, I love a lot of things. You can see them here.
I’m not sure how long exactly I’ve been ‘getting up early’ but at this stage it’s long enough that it seems normal. In a climate where late mornings are king – where the city buses don’t leave anywhere until almost 9am on a Sunday morning – getting up a full two hours before leaving for work is not how we grow up.
But I’ve been doing it now for a while and I love it.
I wake up around 6, or sometimes closer to 6.15, and I head straight to my desk. When I’ve made it that far I either wrap up in a blanket or open the window and start writing. I write morning pages, three of them. Sometimes I do it with my eyes half closed and my brain half dead, but I still do it. It’s become a part of my day really quickly. I think I thought it would reveal things to me, things about my inner psyche that I hadn’t known about. But it seems not to be there just yet, instead I hammer out little details, I make decisions and I put some thoughts out of my head. You know those thoughts that just run around and around and around? Yeah, not so much anymore. By putting them down on paper and thinking them out a little further than that one sentence, I’m getting places.
When that’s done, I’ll write a blog post or edit some photos. Now that I spend my days in front of a computer again, I’ve made a rule that I don’t switch it on when I get home from work. So I do all my editing and writing in the morning, and I do less faffing on facebook too. Time limits!
I can feel things changing, these little things all add up and I feel as though I’m on the edge of something new and exciting. Before I even think about breakfast, I’ve already accomplished something tangible. It’s a great feeling.
Have you ever tried morning pages? Would you?
PS – That photo was taken on one of my most ridiculously early mornings. Setting my alarm for 4am at 1am after a long night of playing cards and drinking beers. It was in Hoi An last year on a photo tour with a pal who lives there, Etienne runs photo tours in his adopted home town of Hoi An and all over SE Asia. It was at the very start of the trip and the sun was just coming up. In the tropics there isn’t much time for sunrise and sunsets but it was gorgeous to be there at the waters edge in the dark of the night and then out on the water as the sun rose up in the sky.