Today’s journaling / reflection prompt: What do you stay up for? What keeps you up in the mornings?
Most days I grumble my way out of bed after 5 alarms have gone off, but some mornings, some irreplaceable mornings like today, I emerge lucid and fully formed, as if I’d been awake the whole night. Falling back asleep, instead of waking up, becomes difficult.
On mornings like this - always a soft purple blue sky - more feels possible with the world.
That light film between awake and asleep is so thin, that one word misspoken or one too many minutes reading the news dissipates it, absorbs and dissolves the feeling that everything is coated with what must be magic. The hush of surreal stillness that permeates all around me. How can the world ever be this quiet? And how can my mind feel so at peace to see it, finally for what it is?
After dinner the other night, a sudden phrase bubbled its way up my chest, blurting its own way out - “I’m so bored.” I spoke to no one in particular, but K was there, laughing as I grumbled some more.
I’m finally exactly where I need to be to start learning about the world - at this new job, in this new home with him, in a new place where I feel like a beginner in the best way possible. Yet I’m not actively pursuing any of it. I feel stuck in my own lack of motivation.
Hearing how ridiculous I sounded, I mentally bit my tongue. Some teenage version of me must have said this a million times to friends, to teachers, to myself, in defiance of suburbia while deeply in love with the same kind of safe, soft sky I look at now.
What a privilege it is to have found boredom after a year of mayhem, after a period of what feels impossible, of waking up to an uncertain world, and of my heart taking up residency in my throat most days when even now, I’m in disbelief at seeing more inequality in the world than I knew was possible - not from naïveté but from lack of willful exposure. I’ve always known the world is unfair, but I didn’t know the extent to which I chose not to see this.
“Boredom is good,” I weakly course corrected, embarrassed. “Boredom means I’m safe and no longer in pain. Bored is good.”
This moment of boredom felt costly. It took something from me to admit how underwhelmed I felt, how uninspired by the world - a kind of bargaining chip I wasn’t ready to admit yet. I felt weak.
This morning feels like the opposite of that. But when I try to pin it down in words, only cliches crop up - a quiet hum of electricity, a buzz in the air.
I’ve yet to find the words to clothe it, but I know it is true as much as it is real - the excitement of being a small, unseen person, awake at 6am, in her own little corner of the world, simply observing.
The soft glow of trees that cast pink shadows onto crisp white blinds. A window cracked open ahead of lilac curtains - is my neighbor asleep with the morning air, or having an early start too? I pick K’s hair out of my mouth as I count five cars passing by in a row that look identical, swishing slower than they must appear, street-side. Early dog walkers, basked in a glow, with their tired old dogs towed through rising sun and shadows. The trees that have started filling out with green; the promise of spring in the cold air.
This is not boredom. Even though everything looks the same from the outside - me facing a screen, slouched and stationary - I’m a different person on these mornings. There is something moving me.
“I forget to feel sometimes,” our friend G said last night, on parenthood. “I sometimes just see her as a checklist of things to do.”
I resonated with this deeply about so much in life. Then G fell asleep on E’s shoulder midway through our call, exhausted. It said more than words ever could.
Maybe the way out of boredom is not from having more things to do, but doing them feelingly.
Margin Notes
Hello dear friend. A few hours after I wrote this in the early morning, I accidentally backslapped a stranger on the street. I didn’t realize she was walking past me the very second I decided to turn around and point energetically in the opposite direction - only to meet her face with the back of my hand. I apologized profusely, and her gracious answer, when she took her mask off to readjust, laughing, “Oh don’t worry, I needed to wake up this morning, and that helped!”
There’s no point to sharing this story, other than as a PSA to watch where you’re gesturing excitedly, and to share the small piece of immense hope that I felt in this moment - the generosity she extended with ease. She could have just as simply told me off, or grumbled her way past me, but she didn’t. She left me inspired - what grace it must take to be extraordinary in these small, remarkable ways.
I’m taking this hope with me as we embark into spring. And I hope you are given moments to discover this in the coming weeks, too, wherever you are.
Until next time, be well, sending you big hugs, Kerri
Photo by Emma Simpson on Unsplash
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