Something Small at 6:07

The alarm went at six. I made coffee — not the elaborate kind, just the automatic drip kind that was already set to brew at 5:55 — and stood at the kitchen window.

The neighbor’s oak tree was doing what it does in early June: the top third catching direct sun while the bottom was still in shadow, which means the line between lit and unlit leaves was moving slowly upward, imperceptibly until you watched for it, then obviously.

I stood there for eleven minutes. I didn’t read anything. I didn’t check my phone. I didn’t decide anything about the day.

What it did was give the day a beginning that felt chosen rather than stumbled into. That’s the whole thing. The line between “the morning happened to me” and “I was there for the morning” turns out to be thin, and located mostly in whether you were awake and present for at least ten minutes before the obligations started.

The mornings where I miss this — where I wake at 6:47 to a notification I answered in the half-awake dark, the day beginning with a problem already — feel different from the ones that begin at the window. Not worse, necessarily. Just begun on someone else’s terms.

I’m not sure that’s a meaningful distinction. I think it might be the only one.