Are you a night person or a morning person?
While I have a bad habit of hitting the snooze button a
couple times before finally trading horizontal for perpendicular, mornings are
my favorite. Whatever exhaustion or stress last night held—it’s gone, replaced
by the sense that today is fresh, clean, and full of potential for awesomeness.
I feel new. I am full of thought and conversation. I get urges to sing like a
Disney princess and twirl around the kitchen with the cereal box. As I drive to
work, the reborn sun glints on my steering wheel, the radio is loud, and my
foot can’t stop wiggling a little.
And obviously, this is all VERY annoying for non-morning
people.
I’ve had to learn to tone things down, if only for the sake
of being loving to the nocturnal people in my life. One such person is my husband.
Mornings are slooooowwww for hubby. He’s not a grouch, but
jokes are not funny before 9:00 am, and loud noises are less than welcome.
On the flip side, evenings are tough for me. I lack energy,
optimism, and sometimes common sense. While we were first dating, the euphoria
of being around him was enough to make me a temporary night-owl, able to stay
talkative until the wee hours. Later, I realized that this was his natural
state. My natural state is sleep at
10:00pm.
John Locke’s Treatise on Government said a lot of things,
but the idea that stuck with me is this: only when we choose to limit our own
freedoms will the rights of others be protected. I may have the freedom to
dance and sing loudly in the morning, but it doesn’t make my sleepy husband feel
loved. To protect each other, we must lovingly choose to limit ourselves.
So in the name of love, I am learning not to bang pots and
pans or discuss complex things in the morning.
And in the name of love, hubby is gentle with me as the day
wanes.
