Mornings.
Every one seems to come a little earlier than the last.
A peculiar number of them seem to be Mondays.
I’m not complaining, exactly.
“More mornings” is better than the alternative, unless the alternative is more nights. By nighttime my brain has switched on. In the mornings, left to my own devices, I would mostly just wander in circles until I had a cup of tea in my hand and by then it would be time to make lunch.
So I guess I am complaining.
But for the record, I recognize the futility of my complaint.
This is how my mornings go: I stumble out of bed, and trip over the toddler. Stumble to the bathroom counter, grope about for the toothbrush that has mysteriously disappeared. (Or maybe it hasn’t. It’s hard to tell with my eyes closed.) Stumble into the shower, swipe at the shampoo bottle.
But inside the shower are two large windows, and every morning, the sun pours in through them.
It’s a painfully cheery kind of sunshine, the kind that tells your eyes to open, to let in the light, to welcome in the new day.
In other words: it’s irritating.
But it’s something else, too. Looking up, looking out, turning my eyes toward the world?
It’s refocusing on the distance instead of on the details.
It’s a choice. Every day. I can keep my eyes down, visions of soap-shampoo-conditioner-rinse-and-repeat, or I can look up to the sun. I can be bathed in light, and I can let it change my perspective.
So every day, I can eat the breakfast, wash the clothes, change the diapers, do the next thing and the next, and the next — or I can look into my baby’s eyes, just fall into that deep lake blue, and that is another kind of distance, a different sort of horizon.
I can look at the shoes abandoned in the foyer, at the dishes forgotten in the sink — or I can look at my twelve-year-old, at my nine-year-old, my seven-year-old, five-year-old, two-year-old, really look, and see how far they’ve come. I can squint and peer out at where they’re headed. And that’s another horizon.
There is a time for head down, eyes forward, get the work done—but not all times are that time.
Right now, today, this minute, we can look up, we can look out, and we can remember where we’re going. We can recalibrate for the journey ahead.
Eyes on the horizon, friends. Eyes on the horizon.
—
