Late Showers

A new habit has begun at my apartment.  We finish dinner and clear the table, then I announce that I'll be taking a shower, sometimes my second of the day.
 
I have been a morning shower person for as long as I can remember.  A hot shower, after all, is part of a wake up routine, right?  Part of getting ready to face the day.
 
What I have discovered these past few weeks is that, while morning showers and evening ones include essentially the same elements, they are actually (and undeniably) fundamentally different events.
 
The morning shower is part of a process--the process of waking oneself up, of preparing to face the world for the day. It is essentially something done FOR other people--so they get the awake you, the hair washed you, the shower fresh smelling you.
 
The evening shower, on the other hand, is really just for yourself. (I suppose that if you work at a smelly job, it's for your family too, but that's not what I'm talking about here.) It's not about getting ready for something or about putting your best self forward.  It's about enjoying the hot water just because it's hot, enjoying the moments alone after a day of constantly meeting other people's needs, enjoying the feeling of washing off one day to move toward another.  It doesn't necessarily replace the morning shower (though it helps on a day you oversleep!). Rather, it is kind of like an end of day gift to yourself for a job well done.
 
I'm sure there was a time when I would have said that taking two showers in a day surely meant a person had too much time on her hands. And maybe I should be busier.  Maybe soon, I will be far too busy even to think about such a luxury.
 
Or maybe, just maybe, with a little extra time, I have stumbled onto something great, something that, like this blog, I will hang on to doing, even if the clock says there's not enough time.  Just one of those choices that, thank goodness, a little free time enables us to see.