Night is the New Day
Afternoon activity is a fake idea (11am to 4pm is a time best ignored)
I am not really a "morning person", but with age I realize it’s more that the different parts of the day bring with them a distinct kind of psychological engagement. These days I think both "morning people" and "night owls" are adjacent for gaining mental focus and energy from ranges of hours which are not late morning through late afternoon. It’s healthiest for our circadian rhythm to follow the hours of the sun and not stay up all night, but I also think the hours when the sun is strongest are the most ideal for sleeping.
In that recent post about standing cultivation done in proximity to trees, I mentioned traditional Daoist cosmology contains various metaphysical correspondences, and that different tree species have affinities which align them with such categorizations. This is certainly not news for anyone who has already read a bit about any practice derived from the bagua sequences. The 24 hours of the day are divided into 2-hour segments between the odd numbers of the clock (1-3, 3-5, 5-7, 9-11, 11-1, …). So a new day beginning at 00:00 midnight is in the exact middle of the 11pm to 1am interval.
When practicing meditation cultivation practices in particular, depending on on the lineage and teacher, certain specific 2-hour segments of the day are not used for practice due to the overwhelming negative effect if practiced chronically. These are explained by their yin/yang emphasis being the most extreme windows of the day, and having a negative effect on a person practicing within these hours consistently over time. One example is the window from 11am until 1pm.
I tend to take that even further: the times I find least appealing for practicing meditation or standing cultivation are from around 10-11am until 4-5pm. Some of us are "morning people" and some of us are "night owls", but none of us are "11am-to-5pm people". Yes, most of us have to work and do activities during the daytime hours, but do we really like this arrangement? Outside of far ranges of northern/southern latitude or the winter months, we only use these wasteland hours because it seems rather abstract to question them like this. These are the least appealing hours of a day, and not even because of the association with the eternal grind of “productivity”, but because from 11am until 5pm naps are particularly fulfilling: they hit naturally, truly refreshing. It’s difficult to nap earlier than this, while waking up later will interfere with nighttime sleep.
Oh sure, you shouldn’t sleep too long, because you also need to sleep at night—but this window is when you’ll naturally crave that high grade day sleep, especially during the hotter seasons (which we’ve all come to accept lately as nearly every season of the year for the rest of our time on Earth). Usually we spend afternoons physically slogging through the sun’s heat and rising temperature of the environment absorbing the sunlight, or sitting in a room and clicking and clacking digital inputs into digital software for some digital product or digital media. Maybe not everyone lives this way (landed gentry), but the point is these are unacknowledged low-quality hours.
Entirely without controversy, the best hours are during early morning, early evening, and the middle of the night: 5-9am, 5-9pm, and 11pm-3am. These are premium hours. The best sleep would be from 10am to 4pm during the day, 9-11pm at night, and then at 3-5am. What’s pertinent is being awake and doing cultivation practice throughout a portion of the 5-7am and 5-7pm windows. Sitting in meditation and standing during these hourly blocks of the day is gonna optimally develop qi, with assistance from the processes of the planet itself, and the sun and moon. Concepts like "earthing" and "sun gazing" also derive from the quality of the energetic response of the entire environment and planet at sunrise and sunset, especially during the brief periods when the sun can be observed by a person directly without ocular harm.
Early morning and early evening energies gives more mental energy than any other hours, and shouldn’t be missed if you like that sort of stuff. Sleeping through sunrise and sunset will usually cause that dank, sluggish feeling. I once spent a university semester abroad in Sweden in Uppsala, and the lack of sunlight from November through early January increasingly had this effect: gradually it became a perpetual fatigue, and at some point bordered on the moribund. That part of the country isn’t even halfway up Sweden’s latitude, either. Up north, going crazy is just normal.
Speaking of crazy, consider: humanity hasn’t been doing nearly enough to prepare for, let alone mitigate, the exponentially worsening climate, so perhaps it might be sensible in the future to limit daytime activity in favor of evening and night-time and early morning periods instead. Sounds eccentric perhaps, but this is how people have often exercised in tropical climates. If training or practicing outside (or without A/C), it has to be done during the early morning and early evening hours. It becomes too hot by 9-10am to do stuff like standing cultivation or slow-paced form practices—and now it’s become considerably hotter still all over the planet.
As for myself, I’m not even in the southern USA, yet where I live is a cruel and sweaty dimension from April until September, all during which it’s a Book of Job devotional madness to do outdoor standing or form after 10am (unless you’re in some quality tree shade). Night is the new day, this is the way!
