The Inheritance of Dawn
The Inheritance of Dawn
Iam an early riser, and I carry the habit like a minor decoration — a private medal polished before dawn. It is not something I announce, yet it glints faintly in the half-light.
“Good morning,” I say to no one in particular as I step out of the bedroom and descend the stairs. It is five o’clock. The house is still. The suburb lingers in that grey hour before commitment. Even the birds seem undecided, as though weighing the cost of song. The rest of the world, or so I prefer to imagine, is asleep.
In these moments I feel a small, unreasonable superiority.
While others lie in the soft anarchy of dreams, I have already boiled the kettle. I have already glanced at the headlines. I have already arranged the first thoughts of the day. The morning feels newly issued, and I am its first custodian. There is a quiet arrogance in that notion, though I try not to look at it directly. It survives best when unexamined.
Waking early has never required effort. It arrived without discipline. In our household, mornings were not negotiated; they were assumed. We rose early and retired early. There were those brief, turbulent teenage years when I argued for the right to linger in the evening — for youth, for noise, for participation in the glow of later hours. My mother regarded such arguments as temporary delusions. In time, she was proved correct.
But the habit did not begin at home alone.
A few years before adulthood, in a Christian Brothers formative school where I was a boarder, the bell rang at 5:30. By 6:30 we were at Mass. I read the morning readings more than once, my adolescent voice carrying scripture into a chapel still heavy with sleep. There was discipline in that life — not harsh, but structured. Dawn belonged to God before it belonged to us.
Later, in Dubai, waking early felt not like virtue but necessity. I rose at 5:30, out of the house by six, and arrived at the bank by seven. I was thinner then, younger, sharpened by ambition and climate. The mornings there were already warm, the sky pale and expanding over towers and construction cranes. The city was building itself at speed, and to be awake early was simply to keep pace with it. There was no superiority in it — only movement.
Perhaps the habit was reinforced there, burnished by routine and expectation. Or perhaps it had already been set, like a clock wound too tightly to unwind.
Most of my friends now live by a different clock. They dine late, speak in animated bursts after nine, and send messages when I am already negotiating with sleep. Midnight, for them, is not an ending but a preface. For me, it is an abstraction. I eat at four in the afternoon — on disciplined days, half past three. By seven-thirty I am in bed, folded into darkness with the satisfaction of someone who has concluded his affairs.
Between six and six-thirty, during the evening news or some documentary murmuring in the background, I surrender to a brief and treacherous nap. Twenty minutes. A rehearsal for the longer departure. I wake slightly disoriented but pleased, as though I have practised something essential.
After dawn I walk — two streets up and down, circling the same obedient houses and parkways— with twelve thousand steps set before me like a modest pilgrimage. The pavements are cool. Lawns glisten. A lone dog barks from behind a fence, offended by my predictability. I listen to podcasts as I move, collecting small parcels of knowledge — history, politics, stray life lessons — as though wisdom might seep upward through the soles of my shoes. By half past eight I am home again, faintly virtuous, and only then do I allow myself breakfast.
There is calculation in this arrangement. Nearly sixteen hours separate dinner from breakfast. It keeps me slim. It provides the quiet pleasure of restraint. I know my body well enough to recognise its limits. I am not a creature of the night. I do not enjoy late parties, the laughter that grows louder as coherence declines, the gradual slackening of time. I prefer the clarity of morning to the indulgence of evening.
I wish I could claim immunity from judgement. When friends greet my habits with sarcasm — when they imply that I have retired prematurely from life — I tell myself I am unmoved. I speak of the hours gained, the gym completed before evening, the coffee taken without hurry, the headlines absorbed before the day has properly begun. I speak of punctuality, of order. That, too, is a separate story. Time matters to me. Lateness unsettles me in ways I cannot entirely explain.
And yet, beneath the defence, there is a harsher thought I hesitate to admit: that late risers lack discipline. That they are disorganised. That they have not quite assembled their affairs. It is an ungenerous conclusion, and I know it. But superiority, even the mildest form, depends upon comparison.
The world, however, does not confirm my prejudice. It belongs, largely, to the night-minded. Restaurants glow. Conversations bloom. Cities stretch themselves into brightness. Morning people inherit a different kingdom — pale light, cold tiles, birds clearing their throats in the trees.
My advantage, such as it is, depends entirely on silence. Once the others wake and the machinery of the day begins to turn, my head start diminishes. The late sleepers rise refreshed and articulate. Their evenings extend long after mine has closed. By seven-thirty I am already withdrawing.
I remember, as a teenager, watching my father fall asleep on the couch while the evening news murmured on. The house would be entering its nightly animation — plates clinking, laughter from another room, someone arriving home — and there he would be, chin resting on his chest, surrendering without ceremony. I mistook it then for defeat. The world, to my young mind, was only just beginning.
Now I understand it differently.
What I saw as withdrawal was completion. His day had begun before ours. His labour — visible and invisible — had already been expended. The body, having honoured its obligations, claimed its rest. There was no drama in it. Only rhythm.
I sometimes wonder whether this early summons is genetic — an inheritance carried not in stories but in instinct. A clock embedded somewhere beyond preference. I catch myself nodding off during the news and recognise the posture. It is not imitation. It is continuation.
What time I wake feels, at moments, like a reflection of who I am: orderly, deliberate, unwilling to drift. And yet perhaps it is simpler than that. Perhaps it is merely the natural arrangement of my particular machinery — shaped by chapel bells, by desert mornings, by a father asleep before ten. Some men bloom at midnight. Others at dawn.
I hope my children and grandchildren are spared this early dimming, this gentle retreat from the brightness of evening. Let them have their glowing restaurants and long conversations. Let the world belong to them for as many hours as possible. And yet, if one morning they find themselves awake before dawn, standing alone in a silent kitchen while a kettle hums into life, feeling a faint and curious accomplishment, they may think of me. And perhaps of him.
In that way, the morning becomes less an achievement and more an inheritance.
If there is superiority in it, it is a gentle one.
A superiority built not on conquest, but on quiet.
On continuity.
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