My Secret Public Journal

Every morning begins almost exactly the same way.

At six o’clock, my alarm goes off. I am not a morning person, and there is rarely anything heroic about those first few moments of consciousness. I do not spring from bed eager to greet the day. I emerge slowly. Before I have completely gathered myself, I usually speak the first words of the morning into the darkness: “Google, good morning.”

The lights come on. NPR begins playing. The headlines tell me what happened while I was asleep.

And gradually, the world comes back.

Steven J. Levin’s 6am News captures something I recognize immediately in that transition. A figure lies beneath the covers in a darkened bedroom, not quite asleep but not yet fully participating in the day. The room remains largely in shadow. The bed dominates the composition, its dark mass holding the body in the private world of night. Yet the figure’s attention has already moved somewhere beyond the room.

That is what interests me most about the painting. Physically, almost nothing is happening. A person is still in bed. Psychologically, however, an enormous transition is underway.

The world has begun to enter.

There is something almost paradoxical about waking. Consciousness returns before we necessarily feel ready to inhabit it. The responsibilities of the day exist before we have summoned the energy to meet them. Work is waiting. Other people are waiting. Problems already exist. Decisions will have to be made. Yet for a few minutes, we remain suspended between the interior world of sleep and the social world into which we are about to step.

My morning routine helps me cross that boundary.

The word “routine” can make such behavior sound trivial. It suggests repetition without reflection, an automatic series of tasks performed because they have always been performed. But ritual is repetition given meaning, and I have increasingly come to understand my morning in those terms.

The alarm. The spoken command. The lights. The headlines. Getting dressed. Preparing to leave.

None of these actions is remarkable by itself. Together, however, they form a structure that carries me from one state of being into another.

I do not wake up ready for the day. I have developed a ritual that helps me become ready for it.

Psychologically, rituals provide predictability at precisely the moments when we are moving between states. Human beings mark births, deaths, marriages, graduations, beginnings, endings, entrances, and departures through patterned actions because transitions can be psychologically disorienting. Ritual gives shape to what might otherwise feel undefined.

The transition from sleep to work is certainly less dramatic than those great thresholds of life, but it is still a transition. Each morning, I must reconstruct the version of myself that will walk into the school, encounter students and colleagues, make decisions, solve problems, listen carefully, and remain present to other people.

At six o’clock, that person does not yet entirely exist.

The ritual helps assemble him.

There is even something faintly liturgical about it. In monastic traditions, the day is organized around fixed hours. The morning office interrupts sleep with words, readings, and attention directed toward something larger than the individual. My own morning office is thoroughly secular: electric lights, a smart speaker, coffee, news, podcasts, and the practical preparations required to get to work on time.

Yet the architecture is surprisingly similar.

The day begins by being oriented toward a world beyond myself.

The headlines matter for that reason. Before I become absorbed in the immediate concerns of my own life, I hear what has happened elsewhere. Governments have acted. Wars have continued. Elections have shifted. Markets have moved. People have died, discovered, protested, won, lost, argued, created, and endured.

While I was asleep, the world continued without me.

The morning news is therefore more than information. It is an act of orientation. It reminds me that my own day, however consuming it may eventually become, exists inside a much larger human story.

But my favorite part comes after the headlines.

I never quite know what will play next.

I follow enough podcasts that the possibilities are wonderfully broad. One morning might carry me into ancient history or contemporary politics. Another might begin with biblical scholarship, skepticism, philosophy, or religion. Some mornings bring football, hockey, baseball, or soccer. Others bring film criticism, Stephen King, science, economics, books, education, or an extended conversation with someone whose work I barely knew before the episode began.

I know approximately how the morning will unfold.

I do not know what I will be thinking about twenty minutes later.

That small uncertainty has become one of my favorite parts of the ritual.

I think of it as a kind of bounded serendipity. The boundaries are mine. I have chosen the podcasts. I have gradually constructed the library through years of following questions and interests. The possibilities are therefore not random in the purest sense.

But I surrender the sequence.

I curate the world and then allow the world to surprise me.

There is a pleasure in that surrender because so much of adult life is necessarily structured. Alarms, calendars, schedules, responsibilities, deadlines, meetings, and routines organize our days before we ever enter them. I know where I need to be. I know what time I need to arrive. Much of what follows six o’clock will be determined by obligations that existed before I awakened.

For a little while, though, I leave one door open.

Perhaps that is also why this practice speaks so strongly to the generalist in me.

I have never experienced my intellectual life as belonging comfortably inside a single category. Education may be my profession, but history changes how I understand education. Psychology changes how I understand students. Religion changes how I understand culture. Politics changes how I understand institutions. Philosophy changes the questions I ask of almost everything. Film gives me another language for thinking about narrative, memory, fear, beauty, identity, and human behavior. Sports can suddenly become sociology, economics, leadership, probability, community, or tribal belonging.

The categories are useful, but they are never entirely real.

The world itself is interdisciplinary.

Perhaps being a generalist is not simply about knowing many subjects. Perhaps it is about refusing to believe that those subjects were ever as separate as we pretend they are.

That is why the variety of my morning listening matters to me. The point is not merely that I enjoy many different things. It is that ideas begin to cross boundaries when they are allowed to occupy the same mind.

A conversation about a political institution may remind me of something I have read about organizational psychology. A discussion of an ancient religious movement may illuminate something about contemporary identity. A film podcast may lead me toward questions about grief, fear, memory, or morality. A sports discussion may unexpectedly become a lesson in leadership or group dynamics.

The generalist habit is not accumulation for its own sake.

It is synthesis.

I am less interested in possessing disconnected facts than in noticing what happens when one piece of knowledge encounters another.

In that sense, curiosity is not simply a personality trait. It is a practice.

We sometimes imagine curiosity as spontaneous: something interests us, and therefore we pursue it. But my mornings reverse that relationship. I deliberately create a situation in which I may encounter something I did not know I wanted to think about.

The ritual says: Teach me something before I have decided what I need to learn.

That requires a certain willingness to remain open. Curiosity does not require agreement. Some of the voices in my podcast library would disagree profoundly with one another. Religious believers sit beside skeptics. Political perspectives collide. Historians interpret the past differently. Philosophers argue about first principles. Critics disagree about films.

I do not have to agree with every voice that enters the room.

I only have to remain willing to listen long enough to think.

That may be one of the habits I value most in myself, particularly as I grow older. Expertise can produce confidence, and confidence is often necessary. But there is also something intellectually dangerous about becoming too certain that the categories through which we already understand the world are sufficient.

The generalist keeps moving.

Not because nothing is known, but because no single way of knowing is enough.

When I return to Levin’s 6am News, this is what I see most clearly.

The room is small.

The world is enormous.

The figure remains under the covers, physically confined to a few square feet of domestic space. Yet attention has already escaped those boundaries. Somewhere beyond the darkness of the bedroom are politics, history, religion, art, sport, tragedy, comedy, argument, discovery, and all the innumerable stories occurring beyond those walls.

Levin paints a small room containing an enormous world.

My mornings feel much the same.

At six o’clock, the house is still quiet. For a moment, my life is remarkably contained. There is the bed, the light, the familiar voice of the news, and the preparations that will eventually carry me out the door.

Then something begins talking.

Perhaps it is about an ancient empire.

Perhaps an election.

Perhaps scripture.

Perhaps hockey.

Perhaps a movie I watched twenty years ago.

I listen while the room gets lighter.

Soon enough, the demands of the day will narrow my attention. There will be work to do and people who deserve my presence. But before that happens, I give myself a little time to let the world remain wide.

By the time I walk out the door, I have not merely awakened.

I have remembered that there is still something I do not know.