Three in the morning used to be the enemy.
I used to lie in the three o’clock dark and fight it. Fight the wakefulness, fight the mind that was already running through everything it had to run through, fight the body’s failure to do the thing the body was supposed to do, which was sleep, which is not optional, which the research is extremely clear about, and yet here we were at three in the morning again, awake, alert, the nervous system apparently unaware that this was not when the day was supposed to begin.
Last week I stopped fighting it.
I got up. I made tea. I took the tea to the chair by the window, not the desk, not anywhere with a screen, the chair, and I sat in the dark with the tea and the particular quality of three in the morning, which is different from any other time, which has a texture and a sound that no other hour has. The neighbourhood at three. The particular silence of a world that is not performing itself. The one car in the distance that exists for no reason that concerns me. The way the dark outside is not quite dark but a specific shade of not-quite that my eyes had time to learn.
I was there for an hour and a half.
Not productively. Not journaling or planning or using the time in the way I used to try to use it, turning the insomnia into a second shift of quiet work because at least then the wakefulness was not wasted. Just there. Just the tea and the chair and the three o’clock dark and my own breathing and the slow discovery that three in the morning, when you stop fighting it, is actually quite inhabitable.
The body is not failing when it wakes at three.
I am trying to understand that. The body is doing something, moving through something, processing the residue of a day or a week or a year in the way that bodies process things when they are not occupied with the tasks of being upright. This is not malfunction. This is the body being in its own way. And sitting with the tea at three in the morning without fighting is, I think, the closest thing I have found to trusting the body to know what it needs. Even when what it needs is to be awake in the dark, quietly, with the tea, for a little while.
