The first hour is yours

There was a time when the first decision of your day was not yours. Before your eyes were fully working, before a word to anyone in the house, the first cigarette of the day was already waiting. It had been scheduled the night before, and the night before that, by something that did not care whether you had slept badly or had a hard morning coming. You did not wake up into your life. You woke up into an appointment.

That appointment is cancelled and nobody sent a notice. The first hour of your day is now unclaimed. It is the strangest part of these early weeks, that small vacancy sitting where the routine used to be. People expect to feel loss there, and for a while it does have the shape of loss. It is not. Nothing is missing from your morning. Something has moved out, and the room it left is yours.

Here is what you need to know about an empty hour: it does not stay empty. Leave it unassigned and it gets taken, usually by a screen, usually before you are even upright. The first hour decides who is driving. An hour that starts with a choice you made tends to hand you a day you chose. An hour that starts with somebody else's feed tends to hand you a day somebody else designed. The hour is small. The direction it sets is not.

So assign it this week, deliberately, out loud. It does not have to be a full hour, because twenty minutes is already a real claim. Put something honest in it: a walk, a stretch, a page of a book, or the oldest and best use of a quiet morning, which is telling God plainly how you are and asking for enough strength to get through the day. Decide tonight what tomorrow's first twenty minutes are for. You paid for that hour for years. Take delivery.