Be an Early Bird
Journal Entry: Saturday, July 30, 2022
Sometime in the last year or so, I decided to relax myself a little bit and sleep in if I felt like it. I had made a program with myself many years ago to immediately get out of bed as soon as I woke up in the morning. This was to overcome the mental hesitation of not wanting to get out of bed in the morning when I was younger.
Sometime in my 20’s after my son Zachariah was born I decided that as a father and an aspiring artist, that I should be the first to awaken at the first hint of morning light and the last to bed so that my family would greet me when they awoke and know that I was on watch when they went to sleep. This also afforded me some quiet time to myself both morning and night. In the morning typically I would contemplate my plans for the day over coffee in the leisure of the quiet prelude before everyone was awake and begin my work of the day in the studio.
Now that I am thinking about the stoics and deciding to become familiar with them in more depth, I see that Marcus Aurelius had a similar plan about getting up early in the morning. This is believed to be the time he often wrote his meditations. In my case I had a series of watercolors that I called Morning Meditations. I didn’t journal, but I worked on my art in the early hours before the day started. Below is an example of one of these works.
Are you a morning person? Comment below.
Not everybody is an early bird. Some people like to work in the evening or late at night. What all three of these time share in common is picking a time when it is quiet and the concerns of the day have already been taken care of. The important thing is carving out time for yourself to work in your studio.