Are you more of a night or morning person?
Tuesday, 2nd December 2025
The harbour light arrives with cool authority at this time of year – no false promises, just the fact of dawn at quarter past six, whether one is ready for it or not.
Father Walsh was already at our meeting point when I reached the boards, hands deep in coat pockets, breath visible in the cold. We fell into our usual circuit, past Tom’s bench – empty this early, the man himself likely still negotiating with his hip about the day’s ambitions – and toward the shipyard cranes that pencil themselves against December water.
Halfway round, Tim asked the today’s question in that mild way he has, as if enquiring about the weather rather than conducting pastoral care disguised as conversation.
“Are you more of a night or morning person?”
I gave the obvious answer first. “Morning, clearly. I’m here, aren’t I?”
He made a small sound that might have been agreement or scepticism. “You’re here. But are you entirely present, or are you already rehearsing the day ahead whilst your body does the walking?”
An uncomfortable observation, delivered before seven o’clock. This is why seven years of dawn companionship have been both nourishing and occasionally inconvenient – he’s learnt to read my evasions with unsettling accuracy.
The truth arrived more slowly, in the rhythm of boards under boots and the harbour doing its patient morning work. “My body is a morning person. My mind insists on holding office hours late into the night.”
The Evidence of Hours
Yesterday I stood in my kitchen staring at lamb mince and turkey bones, planning menus for Michael and Susan’s visit with the strategic focus I usually reserve for complex case formulations. That was seven-thirty, post-dawn walk, pre-clinic – the hour when I’m supposed to be most capable, most myself.
But the actual thinking – the uncomfortable reckoning with what meat means, what feeding people costs, the question of consent that ran beneath the whole inquiry – that happened last night. Well past ten, the harbour dark, the flat quiet except for the radiator’s occasional commentary. That’s when the real work occurred, when I finally stopped managing the day’s impressions and started admitting what I actually think.
This morning, recounting this to Tim whilst the Delaware reflected our silhouettes with unflattering clarity, I heard myself describe a divided house. Body waking at six, mind only truly arriving sometime after sunset. Professional competence available on demand between nine and five. Genuine reflection permitted only when darkness provides cover.
“Sounds exhausting,” he said.
“Sounds familiar,” I replied.
He smiled at that, rueful recognition passing between two people who’ve built vocations around being reliably present whilst remaining carefully elsewhere.
The Night Custodians
My first session this morning – a seventeen-year-old whose sleep schedule has migrated entirely into nocturnal territory. He arrives at school looking spectral, performs adequately enough to avoid intervention, then comes alive after midnight in the blue glow of screens and the particular freedom that darkness offers.
“Daytime feels like performing,” he said, not looking at me, fingers worrying the shell from the bowl on the low table. “Night-time is when I’m actually real.”
I know this architecture intimately. Not the screens – my adolescence predated that particular form of refuge – but the sense that daylight requires a self that’s presentable, competent, defended. That genuine feeling only becomes permissible when witnesses have retired and the day’s demands have finally released their grip.
We talked about circadian rhythms, yes – the biology matters, and his body genuinely struggles with morning demands. But underneath ran the harder current: what does it mean when you only feel real in the dark? When presence requires absence of observation?
The second session, late morning – a woman in her forties, primary school teacher, perpetually exhausted. She described waking at five to claim an hour of silence before her children need her, her partner needs her, her classroom of thirty needs her. Those dawn hours, she said, are the only time she feels like a person rather than a resource.
“But I’m so tired,” she added, almost apologetically. “I dream about sleeping until eight. Just once. Just to know what it feels like.”
I offered what I could – reflections on how we colonise our own rest with productivity, how morning silence can become another form of work when it’s the only time we permit ourselves to exist. The irony of sitting there at eleven o’clock, having claimed my own dawn hour for precisely the same purpose, was not lost on me.
Walking back from the consulting room to the kitchen at midday, I thought about the two of them – the teenager alive only after midnight, the mother clinging to predawn silence. Both using time’s margins as shelter. Both exhausted by the performance daylight requires.
Both mirrors.
The Late Office
Here’s what I didn’t tell either of them: the number of nights I’ve sat at this kitchen table past eleven, laptop open, working through emails I could easily address during clinic hours. Responding to professional queries with the sort of careful attention that looks like dedication but functions as avoidance – a legitimate excuse to remain occupied when the flat’s silence might otherwise require me to notice what I’m feeling.
Last Tuesday, after watercolour class – paper still damp, pigment refusing to behave as instructed – I came home to an empty flat and immediately opened my inbox. Forty minutes of correspondence conducted with the focused intensity of someone determined not to register loneliness.
Thursday, after Thanksgiving dinner had concluded and David had left near ten, dishes washed with his characteristic care, I found myself scrolling news sites until past midnight. Not because anything urgent demanded attention. Because stopping would have meant sitting with the evening’s tender aftermath – the surprising ease of companionship, the terrifying possibility that ordinary intimacy might actually be bearable.
Sunday night, I found myself reorganising consulting room files until nearly one. Not because anything demanded it – the week ahead was already structured, the sessions prepared for. But Michael’s October question kept surfacing, the one about being so good at one thing you forget how to be anything else, about retirement afternoons that resist filling. And I realised, somewhere between alphabetising and unnecessary drawer-tidying, that my brother and I have built remarkably similar fortresses – his in Baltimore, mine here – both of us extraordinary at usefulness, catastrophic at rest. The late-night filing was simply preferable to lying in darkness with that recognition.
The pattern is consistent enough to be diagnostic: daytime Catherine performs competence with impressive reliability. Night-time Catherine holds court over every uncomfortable truth she’s been deferring since dawn.
The Memory of Late Light
But there’s another layer beneath the avoidance, something I tried to articulate to Tim as we completed our circuit this morning, the harbour path delivering us back to our respective days.
The past few months have offered glimpses of late-evening hours that felt different. Not anxious productivity or elegant avoidance, but something closer to presence.
The Bartók concert in October – chamber music in the old church, darkness outside the tall windows, David beside me in the pew. The slow movement descending like weather, making sorrow sound like dignity. That was evening, and I was entirely there. No rehearsal, no management, just listening whilst something opened that daylight rarely touches.
The watercolour class meets Tuesday evenings, seven until nine. Wrong brushes, appropriate humility, the particular pleasure of being genuinely bad at something in company. The light in that community centre room is fluorescent and unflattering, but there’s a quality to those hours – liberated from professional identity, permitted to fumble – that morning efficiency never quite achieves.
Thanksgiving last week. The kitchen filled with steam and the scent of stock reducing, darkness pressing against the windows whilst I browned lamb for shepherd’s pie. David arriving near seven, staying past ten. The washing-up performed like liturgy, comfortable silence punctuated by occasional observation, neither of us needing to rush toward resolution or away from intimacy.
Those evenings didn’t exhaust – they nourished. But they required something morning competence can’t supply: the willingness to be seen without the day’s protective momentum, to occupy time rather than colonise it with productivity.
What the Calendar Might Hold
After clinic this afternoon, I did two small things that felt larger than their mechanics suggested.
First: I opened my diary and blocked Saturday morning. Not tentatively, not in pencil – properly blocked, nine until noon, marked “Family breakfast – protected.” When Michael and Susan arrive Friday, the first morning of their visit will not be squeezed between errands and obligations. It will be slow. Unproductive. Three people occupying the kitchen table without agenda beyond tea and toast and whatever conversation arrives naturally.
This required cancelling my usual Saturday harbour walk, which provoked unexpected resistance. Seven years of dawn circuits with Tim have created their own liturgy, and interrupting it feels almost transgressive. But that’s precisely why it needs interrupting – because I’ve let morning discipline become another elegant form of staying adjacent to actual connection.
Second: I drafted a message to David. Haven’t sent it yet – it sits in my phone like a question I’m still learning how to ask. Brief, practical, offering possibility without demand: “Michael and Susan leave Sunday afternoon. Would you like to walk after they’ve gone? Say four o’clock, harbour start?”
Sunday afternoon. Not morning efficiency, but late-day companionship. The kind that requires showing up already tired from the weekend, already slightly depleted, unable to perform competence because the resources have been genuinely spent on family. The kind that risks being seen as Catherine rather than Dr Bennett, because by four o’clock on Sunday the professional persona will have nothing left to offer.
Terrifying. Also possibly necessary.
The Week’s Small Experiment
So here’s what I’m committing to, written here as much for accountability as reflection: one protected morning, one protected evening this week. Both phone-light – not absent entirely, but set to the side. Both work-free – no emails disguised as dedication, no files reorganised to avoid feeling.
Saturday morning: the slow breakfast, already blocked. Learning whether I can occupy family time without simultaneously planning the next task, managing the conversation toward comfortable territory, using hospitality as another form of work.
One evening – Tuesday or Thursday, whichever my courage can manage – claiming hours after dark not for productivity but for presence. Perhaps sketching by the window whilst the harbour settles. Perhaps finally reading the novel Jenny’s been recommending rather than treating evenings as extended office hours. Perhaps simply sitting with tea and the radiator’s conversation, practising the radical act of being unoccupied.
Not as permanent transformation – I’m not naive enough to think one week rewrites fifty-eight years of habit. But as experiment. As evidence that evenings might belong to something other than anxious productivity or elegant avoidance. As practice in occupying time rather than colonising it with usefulness.
The Honest Verdict
Am I more of a night or morning person?
My body votes morning – six o’clock waking, harbour walks, the reliable machinery of showing up when daylight demands it. Thirty years of clinic hours have confirmed this particular competence.
But my mind, my actual interior life, only seems to arrive after dark. That’s when the uncomfortable truths surface, when the day’s careful performance finally exhausts itself, when I stop managing impressions and start admitting what I actually think and feel and want.
The division has served me well enough – professional reliability during daylight, private reckoning after sunset. But it’s also meant I’ve spent decades treating presence like shift work, parcelling myself out in carefully managed increments, never quite whole in either territory.
What I’m learning – slowly, terrestrially, with the sort of fumbling that resists elegant summary – is that perhaps the question isn’t whether I’m a morning or evening person. Perhaps it’s whether I can risk being fully present in both. Bringing night-time honesty into daylight hours. Allowing evening companionship without immediately converting it into work or worry.
The teenager who only feels real after midnight needs to learn that daylight can accommodate his actual self. The exhausted mother needs permission to rest rather than colonising her only silence with more productivity.
And I, apparently, need the same instruction: that presence isn’t shift work, that genuine living happens in both morning light and evening darkness, that the divided house might actually benefit from an open door between territories.
The harbour is dark now, Tuesday folding itself away. Tomorrow I’ll walk at dawn – because movement matters, because the body requires tending, because there’s genuine pleasure in morning discipline when it’s not used as shield against intimacy.
But I’ve blocked Saturday morning. Drafted Sunday’s invitation. Claimed this week’s evenings as territory worth defending from my own colonising instincts.
Morning person, evening person – perhaps I’m learning to be both. Or rather, learning to be one person who shows up regardless of the clock, no longer requiring darkness to permit honesty or daylight to demand performance.
The creature wants sleep. The divided house, for tonight at least, has declared a ceasefire.
Catherine
Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.
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