It is early, it is cold, and on a weekday there are perhaps eleven of us scattered through a church built for four hundred.
The eleven
Largely the same eleven. We do not sit together and we rarely speak, and I could not tell you the names of more than three of them.
But I would notice if any of them stopped coming, and I assume they would notice about me. There is a kind of fellowship that consists entirely of turning up in the same place at the same hour for years, and I have come to value it more than the conversational sort.
The asymmetry
I have never once regretted going. I have often regretted staying in bed.
That imbalance has held for twenty years, through three countries and every job I have had. I stopped arguing with it some time ago. When the evidence runs one way that consistently, continuing to relitigate it each morning is not scepticism, it is just a way of losing.
Why not the later one
There is a nine o’clock, and it is warmer, and the singing is better.
But nine o’clock is inside the day. Things have already begun by then, and something will always come up with a better claim on the hour. Six is before the day starts, and what happens before the day starts is the only thing a working life cannot take away from you.
What I cannot prove
The day is different afterwards. Not easier — different. Better ordered, more legible, less inclined to run away with me.
I cannot demonstrate that to anyone, and I am aware that it is precisely the sort of claim one would make if it were merely a habit doing what habits do. I can only report it, twenty years in, and note that I have had ample opportunity to notice if it were not true.