Describe one positive change you have made in your life
The most important changes are not always the ones that announce themselves. Some arrive quietly and only later do you realise how much good they have done. Learning to go to bed earlier was like that for me. It does not sound like much, but it changed the texture of my days.
I live and work in a university residential college, and sometimes it feels as though the residents and I live on opposite sides of the clock. At 9.00pm I am usually tired in a way that is hard to argue with. The day has used me up. Around me, though, life is only just gathering itself. Doors open and close. Voices drift along corridors. The energy of the place begins to rise just as mine is fading. Then, while much of the college is still asleep, I wake early. Four o’clock some days. Five on a good day. We pass each other almost like shift workers.
And that rhythm makes me think about my student years. I can remember the feeling of pushing on for another hour or two, as though late night itself might yield some reward. I thought staying up meant I was wringing more from the day, making better use of my time, pressing life a little further. But I was usually only becoming more tired, more muddled, less able to do well what needed to be done.
What I eventually learned was simple, though it took me a long time to trust it. There was more goodness for me in ending the day earlier and beginning it sooner. There was more clarity in the morning than I ever found late at night. More steadiness. More peace. The early hours hold a kind of generosity that the late ones rarely gave me.
There is a sadness, perhaps, in looking back and seeing how long it took to learn that. I think of my younger self staying awake unnecessarily, mistaking depletion for diligence. I would like to tell him that rest is not wasted time. That the day does not become richer simply because you drag it out. That sometimes the wiser thing is to let it end.
So this is one positive change I have made in my life: I learned to stop fighting my own rhythm. I learned to go to bed earlier. Such a small thing, really. And yet some of the best changes are like that. They do not alter the headlines of a life. They alter its feel.
The Afterword 
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