Читать книгу Morning: How to make time: A manifesto - Allan Jenkins, Allan Jenkins - Страница 10

Early morning gives me time, hope, space. At a moment when they are all at a premium. The city (largely) sleeps. Interference is low, distractions minimal. My day opens up. Stretches languidly. My mind is clearer. My thoughts easier to read. Anxious urgency is removed. The light is almost elusive. I feel my way around, the room, my home. I become like a cat with whiskers. I pour tea. I fill the pot by sound not sight, a reassuring glug. It is curiously comforting to decouple from incessant electric light. I am aware of the air around me. I have hours on my own, free to follow my feelings. I am liberated from the day’s demands. More at one, if you will, with the more natural world. Perhaps just sitting, watching my thoughts scroll by. I can write, walk, gaze out of the window, soak it in, enjoy it, luxuriate. There is time to wonder what I want to say. Time to drink good tea while people around me sleep. Time to hear the blackbird signal dawn (midsummer sunrise 4.42 a.m., London, and gone 8 a.m. by midwinter).

Early morning connects me, moves me, makes me more awake. I listen to more isolated sound while the day and light lift. My room more slowly makes its presence felt. My day, my world, knock politely. There is time to wait, rising sun on my face as I write. Cool light as I walk or garden, free from chatter, except my own, perhaps today a loop over Hampstead Heath, just me and the bumblebees, another early walker in the distance. I’ll nod, quietly say hello if we pass, a brotherly sisterhood of sharing with other early morning appreciators. An hour’s open-hearted meditation on morning, light and life. Stopping to admire the fading greening, perhaps catch sight of a solo heron. I am back before breakfast, in time to wake others up. Time to read, say, Ted Hughes’s ‘The Hawk in the Rain’, to catch undone things from days before. Time to build in new memories, sow new seed.

From night to day, dark to dawn, winter to spring, there is enchantment for me in transition. This is when the owl flies, the curlew calls, the earth inhales or exhales. Flux, a natural thing. From boy to man, child to adult, it is in the letting go, watching, observing, not trying to control the change, where enchantment, even the miraculous, happens. Before breakfast was when I roamed by the river, ambled through fields and woods as a child, in search of young mushrooms and magic. Seeing the dog fox returning to his den, hearing the call of the wild, I knew anything, everything, was possible; reality’s grip lessened for a moment and therein lay the charm. No longer defined by home or who my parents were, there were other possibilities on offer. Whatever I wanted. My imagination soared with the shift in light.

Decades later it still holds true. You can do near anything you want to, be almost anybody you want, the rest of the world is asleep. Loosen your shackles. For an hour or two feel free. There is nothing holding you back. Dawn is an enchanted world behind a hidden door, there if you want it, fine if you don’t. ‘Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me,’ says Thoreau. He’s right.