This past week, I’ve been helping watch one of my best friend’s dogs across town. Honestly, it’s the easiest favor in the world because they’re wonderful pups. Every day I’ve been driving back and forth between their house and mine a few times, and staying the evenings there too.
The extra driving adds up fast. It’s probably an extra hour and a half on the road each day, which can feel a little draining.
And yet, every single morning, I get this gift.
Around 5 a.m., I make the drive home through a city that still feels asleep.
There is something beautiful about that hour before the day fully begins. The late-night people have finally gone quiet, and the early-morning people haven’t stepped out yet. It feels like the whole city is holding its breath. The stoplights seem to work in your favor, almost like they know you’re there alone. The streetlights cast their soft glow on the road, and everything beyond them fades into darkness just enough to feel mysterious.
It’s peaceful in a way that’s hard to describe.
The world doesn’t feel empty exactly. It feels rested. Like the energy of the day is there, but still curled up and waiting. Not gone, just not awake yet. Coiled and quiet.
I love it.
There’s a kind of joy in moments like that that feels easy to miss in normal life. Nothing dramatic is happening. I’m not on vacation. I’m not having some grand adventure. I’m just driving home early in the morning after helping with some dogs. But somehow those ordinary miles have felt sacred this week.
I think that’s one of the quiet gifts of getting older: finding that the mundane isn’t always mundane. Sometimes joy shows up in the smallest places. In a familiar road. In a sleeping city. In a stretch of silence before the world starts asking things from you.
I sometimes wish I could have experienced the old version of American city life people talk about—the pre-COVID world of 24-hour diners, grocery stores, and late-night wandering. I never really got to live in a city when that version still felt fully alive.
But even that imagined world might not top this.
Because right now, I have these empty morning roads, and for the moment, they feel like enough.