Morning

I am not a morning person, nor have I ever been.  In secondary school, I had to catch the early shift of busloads of kids travelling to the schoolhouse.  This made for a daily epic battle that pitted my mother against myself to see whether I would get up in time to get ready, and make it to the bus stop in time.  While my sense of responsibility has gotten better — the Air Force did that to me — my desire to meet the morning is no greater than it was.

However….

Every once in a while, I catch morning, and I don’t want it to end.  So what is this morning that I bumped into again this morning?  It’s a sense, a smell, a song, an action.  It’s a tapestry of sensory inputs that somehow captivates me, at once both fleeting in their existence, but contrarily enduring in their impact.  This captivation is seldom repeatable on demand, despite striving so hard to capture it again and recreate its essence.  Somehow though, I find a way of bumping into a close relative of it on another occassion, and that is a good thing.

This morning, the event was launched with my drive through the countryside toward the office.  I tuned to Fine Tuning on XM (XM 76), and caught them playing “Autobahn” by Kraftwerk… the whole 23 minute electronic symphony.  Darla says that I’m a “tapestry of contradiction”, and the fact that I can reconcile driving through the countryside at slow speed with a mid-70s electronic masterpiece is likely a good example of that.  Once that familiar tune flowed from the speakers, I had to open the sunroof a tic and enjoy the 45 degree spring weather outside the truck.  And it’s then that I was struck with… morning.

I tried to find ways to extend the moment — driving the speed limit, stopping at Starbucks for a cup of hot goodness, and generally trying not to hurry through my travels this morning.  There was nothing I could do to extend the morning as far as I wanted — I had to head to the office.  Bad ol’ sense of responsibility.

I’ll tell ya, it’s frustrating not to be able to revel in this joy of discovery and observation when I bounce into it — the sense of responsbility rears its ugly head and interferes with the sheer enjoyment of the moment — but I’m glad that I have these moments every now and then.  I can see a day when my job will be to enjoy and revel in mornings and events like this, but until then, I will grab as much of the essence of the moment as I can, and carry it with me until I can reflect on it, and truly enjoy it.