It’s been years since I appreciated the strongest drug humanity has yet discovered: rapid motion over great distance. My body, newly returned from America, has been moved so abruptly as to have lost all sense of itself, it’s location. And so I make coffee at five thirty am and sneak outside through the kitchen door that creaks to stretch on the balcony, and then write. The light is not yet bright enough to see by. Instead I rely on my sense of my body running through familiar routines. The long years working to write in straight lines are valuable when neither my eyes nor my hands are fully present. Jet lag has always been a glorious event.

I treasure these moments more on returning home than on departing. On the road, everything is new and the lack of sleep will cost me more in the afternoon, when others are awake, than it will grant me in the early hours. For years I have been the type of traveler that calibrates on airplanes, sleeping in accordance with where I am going, rather than with where I have been. I eat nothing, drink water, and sleep only lightly on the twelve hour overnight flight to San Francisco. The goal is to adapt, to be functional, and to focus on what I am there to do.

On the way home I do likewise, sleeping 12 hours straight to ensure my early morning arrival is in line with my body. And yet, in both directions, there’s a night of waking at five am, my body utterly lost in a swirl of dreams that have no anchor in the day’s activities. In San Francisco I lie still until sleep reclaims me an hour later. At home, though, I treasure the feeling, the quiet moments of my own routine I never see. Before the family wakes, when even the cat is content to check on me and return to his bed.

It’s been years of this life, from one side of the Pacific to the other. A search of this site reveals dozens of posts written with my soul halfway across the ocean behind me. I’m grateful for every chance to move so fast, and for every morning like this one, awake before I ought to be.