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The Quiet Inside
4:00 am.
For many people, waking at 4:00 am is unconscionable.
For me, waking at that unholy hour — with or without an alarm — is the norm. On days when the alarm wakes me, I don’t delay getting out of bed because I know much needed sleep is just around the corner.
Leonard Cohen, Bob Marley, and Paul Simon all sang about the terribleness of that hour. Rives, the first 2.0 poet, said about 4:00 am:
It means something like you are awake at the worst possible hour. A time for inconveniences, mishaps, yearnings. A time for plotting to whack the chief of police, like in [the] classic scene from “The Godfather.” Coppola’s script describes these guys as, ‘exhausted in shirt sleeves. It is four in the morning.’
If so much that is bad happens at 4:00 am, why do I wake up then?
Quiet.
Solitude.
Time to think.
I do my best thinking early in the morning. Of course, this also means I’m usually ready for a nap by 10:00 am — a sure sign I’m not getting enough sleep, well, ever. If I were to retire to bed earlier and rise later, perhaps my creative time would happen at a normal hour of the day. I might also live longer. Possibly.
