A longtime resident of Uxbridge, Ted Barris has written professionally for 40 years - for radio, television, magazines and newspapers. The "Barris Beat" column began in the 1950s when his father Alex wrote for the Globe and Mail. Ted continues the tradition of offering a positive view of his community. He has written 16 non-fiction books of Canadian history and teaches journalism at Centennial College in Toronto.
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Early to rise
The alarm went off as planned Tuesday morning, a little earlier than usual. It was the time of day when CBC Radio airs the last of its overnight international broadcasts. At any rate, it was just after 5 a.m. and I was semi-conscious. I crawled out of bed, wiped the sleep from my eyes, stumbled toward the bedroom door and felt a sudden rush of adrenaline.
“I've got to get away early this morning,” I thought to myself. “Got to beat the traffic.”
Has the fear of getting caught in traffic gridlock between the country and the city haunted you more frequently lately? Have you found yourself planning your life, so that each day begins not when you want it to, but so that you can get the jump on the rest of the world? And do you find yourself wondering if you got up just a few minutes earlier each day, maybe you could accomplish that much more in life? If any of this sounds the least bit familiar to you, you're not alone. A growing number of people - your family members, your neighbours and myself included - we've all become part of a growing obsession: “Early to rise. Quick to succeed.”
Now, for you, rising early may not be a mad dash to beat the traffic down the highway. It might just be to witness one of the great natural moments of the day - the sunrise. It might involve a jog around the countryside before tackling your day. It might also be to enjoy a more leisurely breakfast or a chance to wake before the kids do. It could also have something to do with your wish to be more productive.
As it turns out, if you do prefer to rise early with purpose, you're in good company. So did Peter the Great, Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Webster and, my personal favourite, the great Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott. Apparently, Scott's practice was to rise from his bed by 5 o'clock, have his fire lit, his face shaved and the papers arranged on his desk in perfect order by 6 a.m. Therefore, by the time his family assembled for breakfast, at about 9 or 10 in the morning, “Scott had done enough to break the neck of the day's work.”
But breaking “the neck of the day's work” for Scott meant getting to his writing desk and study … in another part of the house. Most of us have more obstacles and greater distances to cover. When my parents moved the family into its first detached house - out on Kingston Road in the 1950s - my father had to take a Grey Coach bus (not the TTC mind you) to get into his first reporting job. When the family moved again, in the early 1960s, Dad had to drive from “the boondocks” at Kennedy and Sheppard in the days when Hwy 401 and the Don Valley Parkway were still on someone's drafting table at the Ministry of Transportation.
Not only did my father have the ability to rise early to get to his job, however. He also had the knack for staying up late. You see, he covered the late-night jazz and club scene in Toronto. His job was to take in the shows, listen to and interview the artists featured, and then get back to the office to write about it before the newspaper's late-night deadline. But then he would come home in the middle of the night, get a few hours sleep and - because I played minor hockey on Saturday mornings at the local arena - be up in time to catch my 6 a.m. house league hockey games.
The drawback in all this rising before dawn business, of course, is sleep deprivation. And particularly now that we've all just lost an hour of sleep with the end of Daylight Saving Time, it becomes a health hazard too. A group of scientists at the University of Alberta has just released a study of folks who seem to be waking and getting out of bed earlier and earlier. The authors of the study call the early risers, “the larks,” who, the study says, “function best in the morning and tire part way through the day.”
My problem is that while I fit into the “lark” category, I also fit into the opposite category, which the U of A scientists describe as “the owl (who) feels sharper as the day goes on and reaches his optimum around 9 p.m.” Except that I've stretched the owl part to nearly midnight and now the lark part to nearly 5 a.m.
And even I know larks and owls cannot coexist.
