It’s the Waking Up

You know it before you open your eyes. You can hear it, and you can smell it. You are awake, but bundled in a cozy sleeping bag. As consciousness comes to you, so does the wondrous realization that you are outdoors. You immediately enter the new day with optimism. From a luxuriously comfortable hammock, you open your eyes to golden light spilling through a tree canopy like honey pouring from a jar.

Why are S24Os so enjoyable? It’s the waking up.

Or maybe it’s the coffee.

When the newness of the day is less prominent in your thinking, your mind wanders to other things. Maybe it considers all the potential that lies before you on a day that doesn’t demand attention to necessary things. Maybe. Even so, it doesn’t take long to realize that strong, black coffee might be the only thing that could make this moment better than it already is. It stimulates all your senses like raw wilderness.

Or maybe it’s playing in the woods.

You wander around camp. You play with a campfire. You throw sticks, watch the tree tops sway in a breeze, and pedal a bicycle through the park and wave at the other campers. You watch a three-year-old crunch-crunch down the rocky trail on his first camping trip, and you know that several decades later, he’ll still have that same first-time joy of being in the woods…just like you do. You are an adult, but here you play without a care like a three-year-old.

No, it’s the waking up.

The first sound, the first vision of sunrise, the first sip of coffee, the first time ever to play in the woods. They all refresh your soul like waking from a peaceful night’s rest. You wake up with joy and charge into a new day. It’s most definitely the waking up.