I love waking up at 5am, even when I sleep at 1am. There is something about being up before the sun is up and having that quiet time to ease yourself into consciousness. I spend the time debating whether I should go to the gym and generally just trying to feel a sense of ease.

There is a luxury to getting up in the morning and not having to prepare to go into an office. My old routine (before I started traveling every week) was one-hour hot yoga followed by running around the Central Park reservoir (sometimes once, sometimes twice), coming home and meditating, taking a shower, and cooking scrambled eggs naked with a towel on my head. I got dressed and was at work before 9am.

Now the mornings unfurl. I don’t need a schedule per se, though I try to either cram my gym routine in the morning or go directly to my computer to work on whatever project happens to be consuming me at the moment.

The best mornings are silence, when I can get through them without uttering a single word except “one cold brew, please.”