The Sun Doesn't Ask Permission

Before the Sun rises, nobody holds a vote on whether it should.

George Mack opens his essay with a question. You wake up in a third-world jail cell, and you can call one person to get you out. Who do you call?

Whatever that person has, he calls it high agency. I think it is the quality of people who rise.

His favorite picture of it is a tap. Optimism says the glass is half full. Pessimism says it is half empty. Agency says you are the tap. The Sun is not optimistic or pessimistic either. It does not forecast the morning. It makes the morning.

Mack says agency is a tricycle: clear thinking, a bias to action, and a willingness to be disagreeable. Take one wheel away and the thing stops moving. I believe him. Clarity without action is a lamp nobody switches on. Action without clarity is a fire in the wrong field. And without a little disagreeability, both stall the first time someone says no.

His lowest-agency example made me laugh and then wince. Humans put a man on the moon before anyone thought to put wheels on suitcases. We carried them, because everyone carried them. That is how defaults work. They feel like gravity until the day somebody stands up and rolls their bag through the airport.

Here is where the essay meets our practice. Low agency is a default, and defaults are the thing morning is for. Every sunrise is the world demonstrating that the setting can be rewritten. Yesterday's weather is not consulted.

Agency is not force. The Sun warms a room without asking the room's approval, and it does not shove. The people we would call from the jail cell are like that: steady, warm, already moving. They happen to the day instead of waiting for the day to happen to them.

Mack's hope is mine too: you have agency over your agency. It can be practiced, like gratitude, like attention, like rising a little earlier than your excuses.