The Company I Keep

Wanderer Above The Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich

The flight home was a midnight departure. I prefer these. The cabin is quieter, the energy different. There’s something about darkness at that altitude, you look out the window and see lights scattered below, evidence of civilisation claiming its territory.

Then there are the stretches over water. Long distances where everything goes pitch black except for the occasional light. Ships, fishing boats, oil rigs, machinery doing its work in the middle of nowhere. Anyone who’s been on a boat at night knows that particular eeriness. The mystery of open water in darkness. The way you can hear your own thoughts more clearly than anywhere else.

I watch those lights and invent stories. People down there, doing their jobs, living their lives somewhere near those flickering points. Characters I’ll never meet, situations I’ll never know, all built in my head while the plane cuts through the dark.

We landed just past midnight. A cab home. The house was dark when I walked in, everyone asleep. I calculated quickly: a few hours before the usual alarm. The school and work day alarm starts the machinery of the household.

My alarm was already set. Thirty minutes before that machinery needs me. It’s always set there. I rarely change it.

Which meant I had ninety minutes from that moment. Ninety minutes to sleep before I’d need to be awake.

I gave myself sixty.

Harrison solitude

The next day, my friend asked me about it. Why didn’t you sleep the extra thirty minutes? You’d just gotten off a red-eye. You had ninety minutes. Why wake up early?

I tried to explain. It’s not forced. It’s not torture. It’s discipline on some level, yes, but on another level, it’s just wired into me. Automatic. Like reaching for water when you’re thirsty.

I need those thirty minutes. I always have.

The alarm went off. I was tired, sleepy, the kind of heavy-headed exhaustion that comes from interrupted sleep. But I didn’t regret it.

Water first. Bathroom. Then coffee. I sit in the same spot every morning, though I don’t remember deciding this would be my spot. It just became that.

I sip the coffee, and then I start moving. I stroll around the room. Not pacing, exactly. More like... shuffling. Shuffling through the million things my mind wants to have a conversation about.

They all compete for attention at once.

That word my manager used to describe the employee. I want to dissect it, understand why that specific term, what it reveals about how he sees people. But then there’s traffic. Why am I thinking about traffic? The way this city handles it, the patterns, the failure of infrastructure. It’s taking up space in my head, and I don’t even know why I need to debate this right now.

Money. Bills, commitments, savings. All demanding the central stage.

And my girls. I keep telling them: stop carrying things in both hands when you walk. Keep one hand free. You need to balance yourself, to react, to protect yourself if you need to. This matters. I tell them in person, periodically, the same reminder. But it presses harder in my mind. The conversation happens here first, in these morning moments, before I have the chance to say it again. Rehearsing the tone, the words, making sure they understand why this isn’t just a rule, it’s something essential.

But there’s also that conversation I had with my friend a few days ago. It’s bothering me because I missed things. Lots of things. Things I should have said, points I should have made. So now I’m redoing it. Rehearsing a better version, one where I explain more clearly, where I don’t miss the opportunity.

I also need to rehearse today’s presentation. There’s this joke I’ve been playing with in my head. Let me test it out. Let me see how it lands with a fictional audience.

And then, uninvited, that sentence from the book I read the other night. The scene from a TV series I watched a year ago. They find cracks to slip in, demanding their moment.

I need to filter these. Engage the ones that matter. Jump between them.

Sometimes I get vocal. The debate gets louder, more animated. That’s when someone walks in - a kid up early, my wife passing through the room - and I get that look, that question: “Who are you talking to?”

I’m talking to myself. Having the conversations that need to happen before the day starts, before I have to be anyone for anyone else.

Automat by Edward Hopper

I’ve been carving this time for as long as I can remember.

Different living situations, different phases of life, different circumstances. It doesn’t matter. I find the space.

When I was younger, it was early mornings before anyone else woke. Just me and the quiet house and whatever my brain needed to work through.

Later, when there was a household to manage, it became the opposite end of the day. Putting the house to sleep, they call it. Sorting things out, tidying up. But really, I was just creating space to be alone with my thoughts again. A different vessel, same need.

The discipline was always there. The practice of waking early, of protecting that solitude, of understanding that I don’t function right without it.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was training for something.

Watching the Sea by Henry Scott Tuke

These mornings, the alarm goes off even earlier now. Before dawn. Before the household, before the thirty minutes I give myself with coffee.

Tahajjud.

I came to this later in life. Later than I hoped. But all those years of waking early, of protecting solitude, of training myself to function in those quiet hours when the world hasn’t started yet, all of that prepared me for this.

The night prayer, they call it, though it happens in those hours when night is becoming morning. When the world is at its quietest. It holds an elevated place among practising Muslims. A discipline, a devotion, a conversation that requires the same solitude I’d been protecting all along but reaches somewhere different.

I wake and I pray. I read the Quran. I sit with the text, the stories, the lessons.

The conversation isn’t just between me and my mind anymore. Now there’s something larger. The debates still happen: my manager’s word choice, traffic, my girls and their safety, the joke I’m testing, the conversation I’m rewriting. Those thoughts still compete, still demand their space.

But tahajjud is more central now. More intentional. The nights and mornings carry a different meaning.

I can’t imagine my life without it now.

It didn’t replace those other moments. The coffee, the strolling, the shuffling through everything my brain needs to work through. Those still exist with the same passion, the same urgency. But now they exist alongside something that gives them context, that shows me what all that discipline was building toward.

I was training for this without knowing it. Every early morning, every protected moment of solitude, every time I chose being alone with my thoughts over sleep or convenience or what anyone else needed from me, I was learning how to make space for what matters most.

Carl Spitzweg

My friend didn’t fully understand when I tried to explain it. Why sacrifice sleep for thirty minutes of thinking? Why not just... wake up when you need to?

Because those thirty minutes aren’t optional. They never have been.

I’m not recharging in some abstract way. I’m not “practising self-care” or following a morning routine I read about somewhere.

I’m alive in those moments. Fully engaged. The debates in my head, the rehearsals, the shuffling through problems and conversations and ideas, that’s not background noise. That’s me at my most alert, most myself, most honest about what I’m actually thinking before I have to perform the day for everyone else.

And now, with tahajjud, it’s become something more. Not just protecting my own thoughts, but creating space for the conversation that matters most. The one I’ve been preparing for without knowing it, through every early morning, every late night, every moment I’ve insisted on being alone.

People think solitude means being by yourself.

They’re wrong.

I’m never alone in those moments.

I’m in the best company I know.

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Thanks for reading Within the Margin of Error! I truly appreciate you taking the time to read my words. I hope I was able to bring you some value in exchange.

Keep Creating.