I read that Dolly Parton wakes up around 3am to start her day.

I remember reading something about Al Roker and Tom Ford doing the same, around 4am each.

I kinda want to be that person, you know?

The Blessed Martin Luther said he used to rise at around 4am to pray because he didn’t know where else he’d fit it in his busy medieval day.

The hours of the morning feel very fruitful to me, but also very inaccessible if they follow too quickly on the heels of one another.

I’ve spent the week calling it quits at 10pm. I wasn’t always *asleep* by then, but I was in bed by then: no screens, maybe a book, but that’s it.

It was actually freeing to have a bed time. One of the struggles in adulting is figuring out what time it is, you know? I mean, not chronologically, but in that Kairos sense of time, that “time out of time” state that helps us figure out important patterns and rhythms that allow us to move well in our stage of life.

I might be in the stage where I need a bedtime, as much as I hate that idea in many ways.

But there’s a reason that monastics stick to a pretty strict schedule: it frees them. It frees them from having to figure out what time it is. I’ve heard people in the military say something similar.

Like being on a regular diet, like living out of a capsule wardrobe, having a bed time (and a corresponding time of rising) is freeing for me.

The closest I ever came to living like that for an extended period of time was when I was a camp counselor in college. There we had no cell reception, few clocks except for the watches on our wrists, and pretty simple living. There was no snacking except those given to us by the kitchen. There was time for rest and fun, adventure and quiet.

And when the sun came up, you rose. When the sun went down, you retired.

It was the most natural rhythm I’ve ever lived in. I envy that most days.

This week-long Lenten discipline is reminding me of that time in my life.

I know I am instinctively a morning person; I always have been (much to the chagrin of my partner). But I find when I can’t rise as early as I need to in order to feel like my day is full, and fully mine (we give so much of the middle of our day away!), I get off-kilter.

I’m not in a right relationship with myself, others, or the work at hand.

I don’t know if moving forward I’ll keep a strict 10pm bed time, but my plan is to make it the norm rather than the exception.

I mean, that’s what Lenten discipline’s are for, right? To come back into righteousness and exit the wilderness different than you entered it?

What about you? How is your relationship with sleep? Are you righteous in this corner of your life?

If not, what will you do about it? I’ve found that it affects every aspect of my being, including my spiritual self. In fact, that’s one of the things I’ve noticed most: taking the time in the twilight hours to meditate, center myself, and connect with the Divine has opened up my work, my parenting, my health, and the wisdom within.

Rhythms are freeing.

Sleep and I have a sordid history.

I’ve been gifted (I PREFER TO SEE IT AS A GIFT!) of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), and so for much of my choice-informed life I’ve chosen experience over going to bed.

In college I would regularly start my school work at midnight, closing up shop at 4am and rising at 7:15am just in time for my 8:00am Greek class, my participles all accounted for.

I got good grades. I got poor sleep.

I both lost and gained weight in college. Up and down. It made it hard to buy clothes.

No, that’s not correct. I had no money to buy clothes.

It made it hard to fit into the clothes I had. Too loose, too tight, too much inconsistency.

I fully believe that my sleep habits affected my weight. Affect my weight. It certainly affects my food choices. Skipping meals, or eating high calorie dishes to get energy because I was just. so. tired.

Am. tired.

These habits have followed me off and on throughout my life. Being a parent has exacerbated the sleep issue. By the time the boys are in bed I’m tired as all get out, but they just got to bed so those twilight hours are the only ones I have to myself.

It’s a real struggle.

Add into the mix the desire to workout (in the morning? night?) and to meditate (morning? night?) and to write consistently (morning?! night?!). When the day begins at 6am, there are breakfasts to be made and kids to get up and out the door.

The night feels like it’s really the only time…for everything not work or kid related. But by nightfall my body has said “peace out,” and my brain has this big error message scrolling across it and my old patterns aren’t working anymore like a quilter who is trying reproduce a stitch by memory, only the fingers aren’t as nimble.

And also, let me be perfectly honest as a parent: by 8pm if I get one more request, one more touch, one more anything I might just spontaneously combust into a ball of feeble utility.

You know?

The pandemic has made these sleep issues worse. Insomnia has crept in as an uninvited houseguest, sometimes banging around on the pipes of my brain for no reason other than to make perfectly clear that redundancy causes my neurons to go on the fritz.

This week’s experiment with getting into bed at 10pm, come hell or high water, is in its infancy, but I’ve already noticed three things.

First: I’m not missing out on much. Late night TV is largely banal. I console myself with the idea that I can always watch the rerun anyway…and then never do, which seems to be a deceptive pattern that works for me so I’ll keep it.

Secondly: I’ve had to say no to work. A lot of times I’d crank up the old hamster wheel laptop again after the boys are in bed to finish a report, an excel, a writing project, a blog…the past two nights I’ve thought in my midday brain, “I can finish that later tonight” only to realize that, no, I can’t.

And probably shouldn’t. I have to get to bed.

St. Ruth of the Bader-Ginsburgs once wrote that, “You can have everything in life, just not all at the same time.” I’ve come to realize this is true about sleep for me. I can work or I can sleep. And now, at this point in my life, sleep is the more needful thing.

And, finally, the last two mornings I’ve gotten up at 5:00am consistently without even really wanting to crawl back in bed. The most productive periods of my life have been marked by early rising. It’s felt good to want to get out of bed, to meditate in the twilight hours, to make coffee and read and see the first news (always the freshest takes!) and take stock of the universe before the pitter patter feet tumble out of their trundle beds.

In the scriptures we regularly read that the Christ sought a place by himself to pray and be alone, and slept when he had the chance. In the Hebrew scriptures we know God instituted a sabbath, meaning that there were times to work and times not to work. The people turned that into a commandment, when really I think it should be seen as permission.

I’m seeing it as permission.

I have FOMO, but I’m choosing not to miss out on sleep right now. It’s my stage in life. Who knows how long I’ll be in this stage, but it’s time to get back into a better relationship with sleep.