I used to be a morning person. I also used to be a noon person, a mid-afternoon person and an evening person. These past few weeks, I’m unsure what I’ve been.
I’m also not quite sure what I’m referring to when I say “(time of day) person.” It’s impossible for me to be a morning person nowadays because I always wake up just before noon. I’d say it most commonly refers to productivity, maybe? What I’ve come to associate with the phrase most, however, is living.
There are distinctions in English between words like functioning, surviving, living — the former two apply a bare minimum for life, while the latter is something more, right? I’m really living when I’m doing what I live for: being in the presence of art, spending time with family and friends, writing — just to name a few. It’s not like I haven’t been doing those things at all the past few weeks; rather, I find the space in between the moments I’m living widening. Without a strict schedule, my life starts to form little cracks between what I do with my time — little moments where I waste away, staring at the wall or scrolling through Instagram. It’s a liminal time, and I’m getting worried these cracks will further erode as the days pass, trapping me in these in-between chasms.
I was a morning person last fall. My 9–5 internship over the summer had semi-permanently set my body clock to wake before 8 a.m. while my fall classes didn’t start until 11 a.m. At the time, I was training for a quarter marathon, so I began those few hours before class with the oft-feared hell of a morning run. Out of bed, into the running fit, then out the door — my morning routine was throwing myself out of bed across town for a few miles nearly every morning, then back to shower, make breakfast and work if I had any time left, endorphins pumping already to push me to everywhere else.
After the quarter marathon, I fell sick for around a week. My exhausted body forced me to start sleeping in, pushing my personhood from morning to noon — taking some hours to really get into the groove of things rather than kickstarting my days through my runs. Now, I sleep until noon and find myself functioning through my days but still, I feel I’m missing something.
I’ve been waiting for that “something” to return to me. That something that kicks me out of bed to run miles before I’ve had breakfast, that something that fills my brain with ideas to stretch out onto a page, that something that pushes me to make the effort to see the people I love in my life. I want to stop merely functioning — merely surviving — but genuinely living. Instead, I’ve become a twilight person — I live in just a few moments each day, during the last possible minutes between the sun’s presence and night claiming it along with my living.
But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with slipping into the night. I’ve been hoping this is just a rest period for me, and that “something” will return to me. In the meantime, I can help it along. When I can feel my legs pounding on the pavement, my fingers pressing my keyboard, my arms turning the steering wheel driving with my friends, I know I’m living. The same goes for the fingers that take a moment to scroll through my phone and let my mind rest, legs outstretched on the couch, reaching out my arm to pat one of my family on the head. I’m still living.
As I write this, the sun is setting. It peeks just above the curtains to pour a molten golden sunbeam on my wall, bathing a spot on my desk with a light that promises to forge new life. I’m an impatient person, and through writing this, I’ve realized I’m done waiting around for that “something” to come back again. It’ll find me or I’ll find it first. I started writing this article yesterday after a sunset run. I’m about to go for another today, before that molten sunlight is cooled into the dark depths of the night. I will be a morning person again. Then I will be a noon person, a mid-afternoon person and an evening person, then a twilight person again. Then the sun will rise again.
MiC Columnist Saarthak Johri can be reached at sjohri@umich.edu.
