“Good morning! Time to get up! Rise and shine! La la la la!”

Another early morning, so early it’s still gray outside because the sun hasn’t come up yet. 6:30 a.m. Ugh.

“Wakey wakey! It’s a beautiful day!”

Someone is crashing around the room, doing stuff, and the other person is laying in bed wishing to be deep in sleep just like it had been 23 seconds earlier. And yet…

And yet here’s what’s different. Charla is the one saying Good Morning and David is the one groaning with half-closed eyes in bed.

Charla had just come home from the gym.

At 6:30.

a.m.

She is still jet-jagged from a trip ten timezones away. She woke up at 3am and then had to wait, wide awake, until the gym opened at 5:00.

Early mornings are, of course, glorious. They are peaceful, quiet, refreshing, and full of promise and optimism. A good morning makes a great day. Our misfortunate mishap is that early mornings are just so early.

If I could wake up at 5am, fully rested, while going to bed after midnight like we usually do then that would just great.

We are not those people.

Last year we tried a pre-dawn early morning run-walk just as the sun was rising. It was staggeringly beautiful. One of us said, afterward, “Let us never speak of this again.”

Whether early mornings stick as a routine or not, Charla’s optimistic energy was infectious. Infectious enough that I couldn’t go back sleep, and the puppy wasn’t helping either. There’s always tomorrow.

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