Quiet time
I think my favorite time of day is sunrise or really, just after. When the light is starting to filter across the sky and the world is hushed. There’s a video on my TikTok account that I made a few weeks after Hurricane Helene hit our area. It shows the view off my back deck of our pond and land and neighbors and the Appalachians beyond and just how idyllic the world can be even after a horrific natural disaster. I still found peace that day to face the desolation only a few scant miles away. The morning hush was calming. The mist rising from the pond was like a passage into another time long before deadlines and nosy technology and irritating deadlines and a life of stress.
I do some of my best writing at that time of the day. I don’t know why, and maybe I shouldn’t say best because only a small fraction of that writing has appeared in print—my trilogy—whereas the vast majority stays in the journals seeing the light again when I grab a glass of wine and read back over my chicken scratch. I think I just like the quiet. It stills my mind and helps me focus like no other time of the day. It refreshes me even though I have only gotten up a short time before. It’s a breath before the frantic rhythm of my days begins.
The other part that I like about it is it’s totally technology free (Well, except for that morning I took the video, of course. My phone is plugged in, recharging as is my watch and laptop. I usually only have my coffee, my journal, and my pen. I’m old school. Forget the computer. Write with pen and paper. Feel the connection with your words like you never could typing. There’s a switch that gets flipped in my brain every time I pick up a pen—a switch that may only turn on halfway when I use my laptop.
My laptop writing is no where near as good as my pen and paper writing. At least, as far as I’m concerned. Any changes to my stories after they’ve been typed into a computer are always done on paper and then transferred. The very few times I fixed a scene on my laptop, I reworked the fixes in my journals and then fixed them again on the computer. They’re better that way. More real. More impactful. Or so I believe.
It’s a skill—writing with pen and paper—that many of my students don’t have, which I have found to be to their detriment. My opinion: if the government truly wishes to improve education, they need to remove all devices from the schools. Have computer labs for typing only. Everything else? Bring back paper, especially the textbooks. Make students engage their minds again, instead of allowing technology to put those minds to sleep.
Okay, off my soap box now and back to my most creative and restoring time of day. I need my mornings with my journals and the silence of the world waking up to stimulate my creativity, It’s in that silence that my ideas pour forth to fill the void. I realize that not everyone’s revitalizing time is then. Whenever your time for refreshing and resetting is during the day, make sure you don’t ever miss it. And maybe have a journal and pen ready for your great ideas. Leave the technology alone. I dare you.