What an Early Morning Sky Can Teach Us

A close friend often texts me a photograph of the early morning sky while he is out walking.

It is a simple practice, but I’ve started to realize how much it contains.

There is accountability in it. Sending the picture reinforces his commitment to getting out for an early walk. There is also connection. Every time I receive one, I feel that he thought of me and wanted to share part of his morning.

But his example has also made me notice something about myself.

I often talk about leading by example and modeling the behavior we hope to see in others. I also exercise early in the morning, so I could take a picture of the sky and send it back to him.

For a long time, I didn’t.

In my mind, I had plenty of reasons. Taking pictures of the sky was his thing. I needed to get home and start my day. I didn’t have my phone with me. It was in the car, and if I was already in the car, why would I get back out just to take a picture?

Clearly, this would have been a major undertaking.

Daniel Kahneman used the term System 1 to describe the fast, automatic thinking that guides much of what we do. We follow familiar patterns without always recognizing that we are making a choice.

My pattern was simple: finish my workout, get in the car, and move on to the next thing.

Then I began pausing.

I realized that I could get my phone, step back outside, look at the sky, take a picture, and send it to my friend. So I started doing that.

The exchange has become a small reminder that we can carry our own inner weather. We may not control what is happening around us, but we have some choice in how we meet it.

I often think about Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and his writing about the freedom to choose one’s attitude even amid circumstances most of us can barely imagine. Taking a photograph after a workout is obviously a very small example. But the question reaches into ordinary life, too: Am I simply following my default pattern, or am I choosing how I want to respond?

There is also something here about beginning again.

We do not have to remain beholden to every habit or explanation we carried into yesterday. Tomorrow gives us another chance to interrupt an old pattern.

Sometimes that means noticing the awe and beauty of an early morning sky. Sometimes it simply means participating a little more fully in our own lives.

Tomorrow morning, there will be another sky.

I may even remember to take a picture.