a good morning
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve become, at long last, an early-riser.
When you’re working on-set, mornings are usually pretty early — unless you’re shooting nights, and that’s a whole other mind-fuck. But when you’re an actor rather than a director or crew, your schedule is often far less predictable. You could be called at 5am, or 2pm on any given day, and sure you can try to set your body clock to the same early time regardless, but as soon as one of the aforementioned night-shoots rears its pretty head, good luck to you my friend.
That coupled with the fact that I worked in theatre for so many years, and that I grew up in a restaurant family (meaning that my father’s bedtimes were 2am at the earliest, and as a kid attending school in normal hours sleep regularity was impossible), I’ve struggled to ever really cultivate a strong habit of regular mornings, unless I’ve had intractable external force (i.e.: drama school, “normal-people” jobs).
But there has always been something on those days I’ve found myself up before 8am, where the writing has come so much more easily. I made a commitment to myself at the beginning of June that I was going to make some significant changes to my practice (and — hence life in general, let’s not pretend an overhaul isn’t necessary to change the way one functions in work as an artist) so that there was less vacillation, and fewer days where I stared into the middle-distance wondering what I should be focusing on next.
It’s been difficult but enormously rewarding. I started with 6.30am (a good hour-and-a-half prior to previous wake-times), and some challenging attempts at 6am — and it’s been painfully offensive alarms every day for the last fortnight or so — but this morning I found myself naturally waking at 6.15am, and now almost habitually pouring myself into the shower, dressing in the half-light, making coffee and sitting down for morning pages.
Now that that’s more or less locked-in, it’s now time to start pulling it forward further.
The days I’ve managed to actually sit down at my computer and start working on the film earlier, have been the more artistically rewarding. The days I’ve managed to get out there and walk and stumble across images or potential locations have been the days that have progressed more peacefully. I think the more I can get done before dawn, the easier the day becomes. The more honest progress I can make on the film.
And this is because to a significant extent, the deep, focused, flow-work is done before the regular “work-day” begins. (The wisdom that so many writers have extolled over the years is real, and I can now smugly confirm it.)
Embracing the half sleep-wake alpha—theta waves, there’s an integrity there I find almost impossible to access after 9am. Things I had no idea that lay beneath the surface. There’s some actual magic that can be channeled at that hour. It’s worth suffering through the initial pain of the re-set to find it.
