The notebook · July 21, 2026

Three in the Morning

There is an hour I know too well. Three in the morning, sometimes a little before. I wake for no reason, and at once the mind starts up like a machine no one switched off. It is not thought, at that hour; it is rumination. The same worries turn, larger than by day, without the light that would return them to their true size. And I fight. I turn over, I count, I grow irritated at not falling back asleep, which is the surest way of not managing it.

For a long time I believed the battle was to get back to sleep. To reclaim it, quickly, before the night was lost. Then a verse I was working on made me change sides. “Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.” I had read it a hundred times as a pious image. That night, at three o’clock, it reached me differently: while I keep watch in spite of myself, Someone keeps watch on purpose. I am not the only one awake in the dark.

It fixed nothing mechanical. I still wake. But I have stopped treating those minutes as stolen time. Instead of fighting to sink back under, I do one small thing: I name what is turning. One by one, the worries that come back, I set them down — not to solve them at three in the morning, that would be absurd, but to hand them over to the One who does not sleep. “You are keeping watch, so keep this for me until morning.” And often, in the very act of letting go, sleep comes back through the back door, the one I was watching too closely to see.

I am not saying prayer cures insomnia. Some nights stay long. But they are no longer empty, nor entirely solitary. There is a difference between keeping watch alone against the dark and keeping watch a moment with someone who was watching already.

Tonight, if I wake at three, I will not try first to get back to sleep. I will try to remember who is awake with me. In Manna, a word waits for me for those hours — just enough to hold on until day.