My wife started back to work yesterday. Like most educators, she has the summer off, which leads to a more relaxed attitude toward mornings in our house. My work is flexible enough that I can show up anytime between 8 and 10 with no one minding; and of course, when I’m freelancing or working on one of my own projects, the hours are mine to set. So the summer kind of settled in to us getting up most days at 7 (or so)… even on the mornings when I would be up and writing at 5 or 6, all too often I’d work for an hour or two and then crawl back into bed. But now, all that is changing.
Not only is my wife back to work, but Rhiannon starts her final year of high school next Monday. So we’re shifting gears; this week we’re back to getting up at 6 AM so we have time to meditate before they begin the flurry of activity that leads to their departure at 8 (this week Rhiannon goes to work with her mom). For me, the good news is that reverting to the school-year routine will enhance my productivity; I always seem to get more done before noon than after, and if I have a productive morning, that always seems to pave the way for a more productive afternoon (haven’t figured that one out yet, but it’s a consistent factor). But the bad news is what I’m in the middle of right now: a sleepy period of adjustment. My lazy summer mornings are not about catching up on my sleep, you see: I rob Peter to pay Paul, staying up later when I sleep in later. Currently I’m in the “squeeze” when by force of habit I continue to burn the midnight oil and beyond, only to have my precious hours of rest disturbed by alarms and activity shortly after I settle in for my nightly nap. The result: yaaawwwwwnnnn.
I think I actually made it to bed last night before midnight; if the last few back-to-school times are any hint of how my behavior will play out, over the next two weeks I will be driven by survival needs to get to bed a little bit earlier each night. Not too much earlier, mind you: I may be 45 but I’m like a teenager when it comes to resisting my bedtime. Still, it will eventually creep back to 11 or so, and I’ll function on my 6 – 7 hours of sleep about as well as most of us snooze-deprived Americans do. One thing I would like to do, though: the Monastery has Mass every morning at 7 AM. Last Advent I went five days a week, and it was a beautiful discipline, the soft and slow chanting of the monks providing a perfect beginning for the day. The catch: I’ll need to leave the house by 6:30. Throw in time for meditation and my morning shower, and I have to be up by 5:30. Just thinking about it makes me yawn! I really must get to bed earlier tonight.
It occurs to me that straddling the fence between the Celtic/druidic/neopagan worlds and the Catholic/liturgical/contemplative worlds is to live in a place of radically different sleep patterns. My nocturnal habits are a clear holdover from my pagan period (to say nothing of my undergraduate days). A typical pagan ritual begins at 9 PM and can easily run three hours or more; compare that to the Trappist monks whose day begins at 4 AM with alternating periods of chant, prayer and contemplative silence, culminating with the Mass at 7. What these schedules have in common is that they both pull their adherents out of “normal” (ie, culturally mainstream) waking/sleeping patterns. There’s a twilight quality to engaging in ritual activity when sleepy or only semi-awake. The brain can more easily slip into the kind of deep-meditative theta state where a sense of cosmic union with the Divine can more easily break through. I suppose the monastic schedule is slightly more practical, in that it can fit in with a “normal” work schedule. As long as you get to bed at a decent hour.
