What is the shape of a day?
For as long as I can recall, mine have been shaped like a brightly lit, short, narrow tunnel — starting with the snap of an alarm, a bang of adrenaline and a race against the clock that I always feared I would lose.
It was a race to be ready — a series of races for which to be ready, with the starter's gun firing over my head, again and again, as I wired myself for the chase.
There was tip-toe silence in a dark house, shoes slipped on at the door; a dash to the office then straight into bright conversation and argument with a team of similarly wired people.
A live performance before you're actually ready for it: combat and concentration; talking, talking, and listening — intently listening — and then, stop.
After that, the day stretches out into what feels like a slow-motion struggle between work and life as they compete for your attention, demand to be solved.
So, what happens when you make that big change? You know, the one you're always banging on about to your friends? Leaving the job, starting a new career, heading up the highway?
We all talk about it: we hanker for that great change a great deal. It's like an origin story we still haven't been able to experience yet, even though it powerfully informs our sense of who we really are.
The first morning of a new life
After decades of early morning starts, and after even longer of intense daily deadlines operating as a kind of benign threat, I've stepped away to help create a new ABC TV show that will put the well-deserved spotlight on some of our most creative and talented Australians.
But on the first morning of my new working life, I found myself seated in front of my computer at 6:30am and found that someone had blown up that tight, little tunnel and it was now open to the sky — an endless day yawning ahead of me with no discernible shape or form.
What would be the new shape of this day, this life?
My still small son has never woken in any of his 11 years to find me in the house on a workday. He discovered still-warm sheets and spilled evidence of a hasty standing coffee — but not me.
He was thrilled to learn that was all about to change and he chanted the daily countdown to the end.
On the first morning he found me at home, he climbed into bed with me at dawn and we snuggled in blissful silence.
Three days later he was grumping at me while I asked him a third time to brush his teeth and for god's sake take a jacket to school.
(The next morning, I set my alarm for 5am just so I could creep down to the kitchen on my own and sit in the silence with a coffee and only the garden blackbird which, even in October, was still warbling optimistically for a mate.)
Was I addicted to adrenaline?
I had to book a medical scan, and when offered the pre-work time of 7:00am I grabbed it just so I could have an urgent reason again to set my alarm early and leap with panic from my bed.
Was I addicted to the adrenaline? Or have I just permanently become an early morning person who needed to find a new form to give to the start of the day?
I'm not sure yet. When you up-end everything, you have no right to be surprised when you find it's all on the floor.
It's a readjustment, I tell myself. Your body clock has been set a certain way, even while I've always had the great luck of being able to sleep just as I like on weekends. (It's one of my great survival secrets: that I only ever got up early because the alarm went off. If it didn't, I'd still be asleep at nine.)
But it's more than that: it's a process of shrugging off the body's emergency response and resetting my brain to the thing I've been hankering after for years: time to think. Time to stand back and see the bigger shape of things beyond the tyranny of the day.
According to the Harvard Business review, I'm recovering from "work stress" as elevated cortisol levels slowly leave my body, and I learn that I won't necessarily screw absolutely everything up, and ruin a lifetime career with one stupid turn of phrase or ill-judged question. Want to know the hilarious paradox of this? Apparently "recovery" is least likely achieved when you actually need it the most.
Those pre-dawn solo kitchen coffees are starting to look pretty good now…
Life at a different pace
Or maybe the pre-dawn snuggles are the real answer. Yielding to the slower, softer reality of life at a different pace. If you have a growing child, you'll know the shock of wrapping your arm around what now feels like a full-grown man, your toes to his, his breathing as powerful as his father's.
As I do, I realise that in all the years I've been sneaking out of the house, the shape of my son's day has been his exhilarating path to becoming.
For the first time ever, I get to make a little more of that day with him.
This weekend we have bed bugs, crime surveillance bugs, and what bugs people with chronic illnesses about the assumptions we make. I hope you enjoy our always wonderful ABC reads.
Have a safe and happy weekend and let's get back to the music, shall we? Here's a new song from multi-instrumentalist and big softie, Sufjan Stevens, whose latest album was released just yesterday. If the sun is up and there's a warm breeze around you, then this is your song of the morning. It's a sweetheart.
Go well.