Early

“The first step to win yourself is to wake up early.” Sukant Ratnakar

I’m groggy beyond the reach of caffeine today. This is because I slept through to my alarm, which is set for 06:15, and was yanked out of my dreams in the wrong part of the sleep cycle. Most days I’m up a little before the alarm rings. Well, it doesn’t ring, it plays a jolly little 10-bar tune, By the Seaside. At any rate, in the mornings I am not focused on winning anything, much less myself—apologies to Mr. Ratnakar and other business bros. I’m just pottering around as usual, but feeling fuzzy and weird and guilty about needing the alarm today.

Sometimes I daydream about being an on-time or even borderline-late person, rather than a perpetually early one. (True lateness I avoid whenever possible. It’s too linked in my mind to my mother’s humiliatingly tardy arrivals to pick up me and my siblings at church on Sunday afternoons and Wednesday nights. The smug church ladies would exit the parking lot one by one, shaking their righteous heads at us missionaries who’d turned out to be trash. Of course this is by no means why any other person is late.)

Truth be told, I’ve never had much of a handle on how to be an acceptable human. It just doesn’t come naturally. I’m still experimenting, and many of my guesses have been wrong. But one of my seminal strategies has been dependability. On time to work, always have my music parts prepared, on time to fourteen years’ worth of Sonny’s school pick-ups and drop-offs, bring the cupcakes to coffee hour, etc. Exciting, huh? A character in novel by Rose Macaulay sneers “Only the servile are punctual.” A hit, a very palpable hit. But showing up on time is what I can do. 

There’s one other disadvantage to punctuality: I’ll never miss that plane. You know the plane: it’s the one that goes down over the Atlantic in a great ball of fire, and if not for that baby-sitting emergency or the trouble locating your passport, it would’ve been you sinking to the seabed. Ah well. I don’t fly often. Maybe I’ll never buy that ticket.  

Punctuality plus anxiety equals early. As it’s never good to be too early, once I arrive at my destination there are a few minutes to pass. If I think of these minutes as waiting time, that’s annoying. Stifling annoyance is the kind of thing a servile person does, so instead I view those minutes as free time. Golden time. 

Time to: Take a little walk. Write a paragraph, or a poem. Grab a power nap. Snag the best parking spot. Eat a donut, enjoy the sky, take a photo of something interesting. Plot revenge. Scatter my thoughts like pick-up sticks; collect them. Relax into the upcoming task. 

“After some point, it becomes too late to be early.” Mokokoma Mokhonoana 

Yes, Mokokoma, but even when I start out early and arrive barely on time, there’s comfort lurking at every stoplight and roadblock and traffic accident. If I’d left ten minutes later, I think, hoo, boy, I’d be upset now. 

So though I wish I could be timely rather than early, I don’t want to be a late bird. I’d feel a constant demand to explain, as in this Cormac McCarthy quote: “All my life, he said, I been witness to people showin up where they was supposed to be at various times after they’d said they’d be there. I never heard one yet that didnt have a reason for it….” My excuses would make lateness even more late as I tried to cover up what might be the true case. Afraid that the truth would fit with McCarthy’s flinty view: “…there aint but one reason…you know what it is?…It’s that their word’s no good. That’s the only reason there ever was or ever will be.”