My most productive time of day tends to be the early morning. Always has been.  I’m what you call a “morning” person.

I wake easily at 4:30am, on a late day 5:00am – I pour my coffee and start writing. It’s this perfect kind of quiet that fuels me. It’s not just the absence of cars or the lack of people talking in the distance, it’s more about a pure nothingness that seems to be the start of something…  a new beginning, a new day, a new possibility that inspires me.

I’ve always been this person. Even as a kid. Back then, I’d wake up early and run out into the street in front of my house and stand under the still dimming light of the streetlamp and start to dance. I loved that time – I remember it as if it were yesterday – there’d be no cars, no movement, no sound anywhere –  and yet my thoughts were so perfectly clear I could hear the symphony as I danced along the gravel “floor”…

I do love the quiet. My dream would be to live on a ranch close enough to the city, but far enough away to not hear the daily sounds of trucks going by and neighbors doing their thing – kids jumping rope or the gardeners blowing leaves.  In the city, even the quiet of the day is still not really quiet at all. There’s a natural hum that happens during each day, different depending on the time – that too is preferable to pure country living, where crickets and cicadas are a type of noise I’ll never get used too.

Then there’s the ocean.  Oh, how I love thee – but not to live by.  Near the ocean is fine. 2 miles is perfect in fact.  But to sleep by the ocean waves, although beautiful and fierce, would be the same kind of pain to me as the crickets and cicadas – disturbing and out of sync with my need for that pure nothingness quiet that starts my every day.

I don’t know how it ever happened. I don’t remember the day I became a morning person.  I don’t think you can force yourself to be one or the other – it’s just an “IS-ness” I do suppose.  Maybe, if you’re born in the morning, then the morning is your time?  I have no idea. But I was born in the early morning and that just makes perfect sense. 

So, yes, I love the early morning sunrise. The glow of all things new. It’s my favorite time of day. My most productive too.

Carmen