The Weekend Morning

Saturday morning before anyone else is fully awake is a specific kind of time that I have been paying attention to.

Not completely before anyone is awake — Sam does not permit complete earliness, he surfaces at around 6:45 with the focused energy of someone who has a plan that requires starting immediately. But there is a period, from about 6:45 until the point at which Ellie joins us and the day properly starts, that is its own category of time. Sam is in his pyjamas. He is not fully operational. He sits on the sofa with the specific weight of a child still half in sleep, asking, occasionally, for something — the exact item varies, usually something like "the red cup" or "the programme about diggers" — but without the urgency that characterises his requests by 9am.

I sit with him. Sometimes we watch something. Sometimes we look at books. Sometimes he just leans against me and we look at the garden and he says the names of things he can see: bird, tree, the neighbour's cat that he has decided is called "Geoffrey" for reasons I have not been able to establish.

The quality of the time

I have been trying to understand what makes this time different from the time later in the day, when we are nominally doing the same things but with a different texture.

Part of it is the quietness. The day has not yet organised itself into its demands. The working week is not adjacent. The to-do list exists but is not yet present as a pressure.

Part of it is the sleepiness, which in Sam produces a version of him that is less insistent and more contemplative — or as contemplative as a two-year-old can be, which is in brief flashes between wanting things.

Part of it is the particular quality of early morning light in the garden, which changes with the seasons in a way I have started to notice because I am in the same spot at the same time often enough to track it.

The slowness practice

I have been thinking about slowness as a practice rather than a condition. Not the structural slowness of a life that has fewer demands — I do not have a life with fewer demands — but the deliberate adoption of a slower mode in spaces that permit it.

The Saturday morning is a space that permits it. Nothing is scheduled before 10am on Saturday mornings, by a rule that I have written about in the context of the generation gap and that I am extending here into a more personal register.

The deliberate slowness is partly for Sam, who benefits from unstructured morning time in which the day can find its own shape. But it is also for me, in the specific way that the closing ritual at the end of the working day is for me — a calibration, a reset, a return to a baseline from which everything else is easier.

Geoffrey the neighbour's cat

Geoffrey is a grey tabby. His actual name, as established by the neighbour, is Arthur. Sam calls him Geoffrey with complete confidence and no indication that the name is a decision rather than a fact.

I have not corrected this. I cannot find a good reason to.

Arthur the cat sits on the fence at approximately the same time each Saturday morning. Sam says "Geoffrey" with recognition and warmth. Arthur shows no response to the name, which is consistent with being a cat.

The thing I am trying to say

I am trying to say something about the quality of attention that becomes available when you stop trying to use the time efficiently. The Saturday morning is time I could use to get ahead of the working week, to clear the email backlog, to prepare something. I have, in previous years, used it for these things.

I do not, currently, use it for these things. I use it to be in the garden with a child who is still half asleep and a cat called Geoffrey by someone who hasn't been corrected.

I am an older father. I am aware of the hours. The Saturday morning is a data point in the decision about where the hours go.

It is a very good data point.