If you follow me on Instagram, you’ve seen that I’ve spent my second week of the new year in Florida for my swim team’s winter training trip! Even though it looks like fun and games, that’s not the whole story. I was unable to capture the more grueling parts of the trip because I was too busy working my butt whole body off to hold a camera. We have water practice 9AM-11AM, dryland for half an hour after that, a long break, and another water practice 5PM-7PM. By then I’m totally exhausted, but we need to cook dinner ourselves, so I stay up for that and then crash at around 10PM. I don’t even have enough energy to procrastinate! I’m really glad that I’m taking on this 52 project, because otherwise, I really don’t think I would be doing anything else right now but eat, sleep, and swim.

The first thing I do is kick off the ace bandage I have wrapped around my poor ankle (so much for evening out my weird foot tan in Florida), and the next thing I do is pull out my iPad, check Bakery Story, Instagram, the works. I leave a book by my bedside to inspire myself to start the day off with a little reading, but so far it has been but a prop. (I have every intention to read, but this early in the morning it’s too dark to decipher the characters, so really, it’s not my fault hehe.)

The last thing I want to do is get out of bed (this seems to be the trend). But I got a blog to run, so what can I do? 😛 After my first few attempts to photograph from the comfort of my bed, I forced myself up to draw the curtains back, as I was coming up with nothing but pictures of blackness. (I was seriously considering just using those pictures and writing something existential about darkness/emptiness.)

Everything started glowing in the morning light. At the risk of sounding like a nerd, good lighting is everything and I am obsessed with it. I have never functioned early enough with my brain, much less my camera, to catch lighting like this. I wonder what else I have missed. Wouldn’t it be fun to do a photo an hour project to catch all the different lights? But let’s not get too ahead of ourselves yet.

The sun yawns, stretching its rays of light. The world is just starting to wake up, but it hasn’t yet. We’re caught in a limbo, an in-between where time seems to slow down until it stops altogether. Everything is peaceful. Everything is quiet. Well, not quite. Everything is distant. And we leisurely attune ourselves with a cup of coffee, a plate of bagels, a bowl of oatmeal, a sprinkle of blueberries. There’s nothing to worry about at the moment. The future is waiting, but for now we can enjoy the present.

And then I realize: Mornings are just as beautiful, just as magical as snow. To quote Gilmore Girls:

When I was five, I had a really bad ear infection and I had been home in bed for a week and I was very sad. So I wished really hard that something wonderful would happen to me. And I woke up the next morning and it had snowed. And I was sure that some fairy godmother had done it just for me. It was my little present. Of course, many years later, I realized that logically, the snow was not there for me personally. But, still, when it snows, something inside me says, “Hey that’s your present.” I don’t think it’ll ever change.

Not everyone gets snow all the time, but you know what? Mornings happen every day 🙂

And the possibilities await.

PS: Catch the first post of this series: 52 mornings, inspired by 1000 Threads // 01