It's harder to get us up in the mornings; we've adapted to the late darkness, even as it slowly begins to lighten. It's tempting to say something trite about natural rhythms, but we've been pushing the bounds of darkness=sleep for millennia. Dairy farmers, for example, have to go out and milk their cows long before it feels like a good idea.
Elsie Marley's grown so fine
She wont get up to feed the swine
But lies abed 'til eight or nine
Lazy Elsie Marley!
Early to bed, early to rise,
Makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.
And so getting up early is promoted as a virtue. So I guess I'm a wicked individual, blogging at 1 am. But I have the tool, my electric lightbulb, to work just fine until my body finally gives in, right about now. And it's not just the lightbulb; we've had kerosene, gaslight, candelight, hearthlight, and the urge to stay up late and tell stories and sing songs and chat and not go to sleep, for a long, long time. The urge has always been there. We just have better tools to enable that urge.
I wonder if some of my friends who suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (the winter blues), are really better adapted to the real annual cycle: why not shut down for a long winter's nap in winter? Why not just hibernate for the winter? I imagine that's a lot of what went on in isolated farms in snowbound climates, back before electricity and snowplows and internet connections. Why fight it, except for the fact that we humans always want to fight it.
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