Treat Morning Like a Return, Not an Emergency
I spend an hour every night performing the elaborate ritual of sleep preparation—the specific order of face washing, tooth brushing, phone charging, pillow arranging, room temperature adjusting, and mental settling that transforms a bedroom into a sanctuary and a person into someone ready to surrender consciousness. But every morning I launch myself into the day like someone escaping a fire, grabbing coffee and clothes with the urgency of someone who believes that speed can somehow recover the time that careful evening preparation consumed.
We treat bedtime like a sacred ceremony but morning like an emergency evacuation. Going to sleep requires gentle transition, careful preparation, the honoring of thresholds between states of being. Waking up requires only caffeination and momentum, the assumption that consciousness can be instantly operational, that the complex creature who needed an hour to wind down can spring to full functionality without any wind-up time at all.
Maybe this is because sleep feels like a form of death that must be approached with respect and reverence, while waking feels like a resurrection that should happen automatically, without ceremony or assistance. We prepare for unconsciousness like travelers packing for a long journey to unknown territory, but we expect to return from that journey without any need for readjustment or reorientation.
The elaborate bedtime ritual acknowledges what the rushed morning denies: that transitioning between consciousness and unconsciousness is profound, mysterious, worthy of attention and care. Sleep is not just the absence of waking but a different state entirely, requiring different preparation and different respect.
But what would happen if we treated morning with the same reverence we give evening? If we created awakening ceremonies as elaborate as our sleeping rituals? If we honored the return to consciousness with the same care we give the departure from it?
Maybe the rushed morning is a form of ingratitude—taking for granted the miracle of returning from the temporary death of sleep, assuming that consciousness is a given rather than a gift, treating awakening as obligation rather than opportunity.
Tonight I practice preparing for both departure and return, recognizing that both sleep and waking deserve ceremony, both unconsciousness and consciousness merit ritual attention, both the leaving and the coming back are transitions worthy of reverence rather than rush.
