A Morning Shower Angers the Gods

The older I get, the more interested I become in trying to figure out why people do the things they do. I don’t mean monumental decisions or once-in-a-lifetime commitments so much as the activities of daily living, all the little appointments and rituals that must be repeated every so often, even if only for five minutes, in order to keep going. In fact, the smaller and less consequential the action, the more conservative and narrow-minded I become. I might be perfectly tolerant, even magnanimous, in how people might choose to live on a grand scale, but when it comes to mundane domestic details, my mind takes on all the worst characteristics of a barn-sour stable nag: I know the best way home. There is only one way home. The place we are supposed to be is home. That patch of grass baffles and frightens me, but do not try to stop me from eating it.

Never in my thirty-eight years, for example, have I ever heard a convincing reason a person should take a shower in the morning rather than at night. There are no grounds for it. It is perverse to be wet in the morning; it is only logical that the hours before noon ought to be the driest of the day.

Consider what has preceded the morning: You have been asleep, in your clean bed.¹ Consider what has preceded the night: You have been out in the world, contending with it. Which of these two states has greater call for a shower?

But there is more to it than that. If you begin your day with a shower, and are at your cleanest at 8:00am, then the only experience you will have throughout the day is one of gradual degradation. This is spiritually as well as physically demoralizing. Dirtier and dirtier you will grow, as the day winds on, and yet you will have no plan for dealing with it, no hope of redress in the evening; you will go to bed with all the remains of the day clinging to you. It is among other things disrespectful to your bed. “Here I am,” you say, hauling your accumulated filth into the place you expect to find your rest, “at my absolute daily lowest. Accomodate me.”

Consider, too, that during the day you can only expect to encounter beasts and men and machinery, while at night you go to meet the gods on the royal road of the unconscious. The work of the evening is to undo the work of the day, to clear the path so that tomorrow might come in without any major inconvenience. During the day we dirty dishes; at night we wash them so we might dirty them some more the next morning. During the day we choose to think our own stupid and venal thoughts; at night we dream so as to experience relief from our own willfulness.

You spend the greater part of each night exposed to the great and undifferentiated jumble of the divine, without the steadying anchor of conscious attitudes to protect you — does it not seem wise to you to at least approach your dreams freshly bathed, as a gesture of respect and goodwill?

In the morning, you primarily put things on (clothes, makeup, sunscreen, shoes, hair products) while in the evening you primarily take things off; showering is about taking things off and so logically it belongs to the work of the evening. This is good sound medieval logic; Thomas Aquinas could understand it, and he would agree with me. After all, when does dew fall? At night.

And while the intelligent and conscientious night-showerer begins the day relatively fresh — I don’t say they are as clean as the morning-showerer, of course, but there is a limit to how dirty a person can get while they sleep — and can confidently incur a debt of sweat and dirt while the sun shines, knowing they have an appointment with hot water later on. The night-showerer keeps their relationship to filth in good working order.

But I should not dwell on logistics only. Take, for instance, the way you feel after a shower: Pink in spirit, if not also in body, relaxed if not languid, and most of all in need of time to become entirely dry. No one goes bounding straight from the shower into a pair of jeans. The towel does what it can, of course, but even the most committed of morning showerers must admit that a certain amount of air drying is required to really finish the job. (If you will not admit this, I cheerfully invite you to shove your feet into a pair of socks the instant you finish toweling off after your next shower, and report back to me about the experience.) Do any of these states correspond with the morning? A state of relaxation — spiritual pinkness — a need to undergo a process of evaporation, as if you were the top layer of the rainforest canopy — this are all conditions of the evening. The only sensible time to be wet is at night.²

If you miscalculate the time needed for the drying process at night, what does it matter? So you lounge around in a towel for a few extra minutes. Who cares! But if you shower in the morning, and you make the same mistake, woe betide you, for you might end up on fully dressed on the bus, exquisitely and maddeningly aware that your skin is still a little bit too damp for clothes, and no means of doing anything about it. To rush a shower is absolutely fatal, and the margin of error for morning showerers is unforgiving. Is your life so perfectly arranged that you can afford this? Start your day in good working order, and shower at the end of it; your day will therefore progress from dry to wet, from light to dark, from warm to cold, and so better reflect the perfect workings of the universe.

[Image via]

1. Obviously if you have been a victim of night sweats, or the dog threw up on you, or something, you might take a morning shower as a one-off, for hygienic reasons.

2. Exceptions can be made for very hot days, considerable exertion like running a marathon, getting sick, working the night shift, having a newborn, and so on. But we are speaking of general cases, not anomalies.