My alarm goes off on weekday mornings at 7:00am. I usually snooze it for 15 to 20 minutes, leaving me groggy and yawning by the time I have to officially be out of bed at 7:30am. Today, however, I woke up at about 5:30am. And it wasn’t even that difficult.

It was actually quite effortless. I sleep with my bedroom window open during the summer, which means that come sunrise, I hear all sorts of noises: birds chirping, dogs barking, the tentative beginnings of morning traffic. Most nights I wear earplugs to filter out this noise and allow me to sleep until my alarm. But last night I didn’t, and when I woke to birdsong, I didn’t roll over and press a pillow over my ears. I lay there blinking in the cool pre-dawn light for a few minutes. I breathed in the smell of fresh air. Then I got out of bed and watched the sun come up.

I’ve never been a morning person—I love sleep, and I need a lot of it to feel functional. For me, waking up early has almost always felt forced and unpleasant: the shrill alarm, the exhausted headache. But this morning, I felt like I was letting my body do what it naturally wanted, which was to rise with the sun and the birds. I imagine that this is because before alarms or clocks or work existed, humans knew to get up when sunshine hit their faces and animals around them began to make noise.

What I learned today is that early rising isn’t a matter of training myself to adopt a new behavior; instead, it’s a gentle letting-go, a surrender to the natural wakefulness that I tend to stifle.