Morning Rituals
These days my morning routine often comprises thinking about all the things various experts have recommended to do before breakfast, then getting dressed and eating breakfast.
For example, yoga is best done on an empty stomach, and pajamas make excellent yoga pants, so it’s a natural before-breakfast practice. It feels complete when followed by meditation—or by first reading something of an inspirational nature, then meditating.
My morning reading bookshelf, for those mornings when I read things.
But, wait: I really need to kick-start the day with a bit of cardio and strength training, to rev up my metabolism and get my blood circulating. After noticing that I get rather winded when I walk up the stairs to my studio, I thought Why not do that more often? So I started walking up the stairs, back down, walking around the house swinging my arms or, better still, pausing to lift some light weights, then back up the stairs—three times! Each morning! For a week! And then I just got tired of it and stopped.
What about a daily drawing practice? In his book Art Before Breakfast, artist Danny Gregory urges his readers to do 10–15 minutes of sketching in the morning; he has even published an Art Before Breakfast workbook, which looks pretty good. Maybe I’ll buy it.
Oops, I’m forgetting about morning pages, the daily practice Julia Cameron invented and described in her book The Artist’s Way. Limited to three pages in a notebook or on loose paper or whatever works for you, it’s stream-of-consciousness writing to get Things off your mind and onto paper, so you can move on to doing the creative stuff you need to do, whether you’re a writer, a musician, a visual artist, or a person who just needs to solve problems during the course of your day. In other words, everybody.
My morning pages, one day this spring.
Writing morning pages is like using a pen to follow a train of thought, except it’s more like a dog of thought, meandering this way and that, stopping to sniff at every tree, with no destination in mind. Once I’ve written three pages, I doodle a little dingbat to mark the end (art before breakfast!), put an extra-large paper clip on the last page so I know where to start the next time, and close the notebook. Once filled, it goes directly into the recycling. I even use composition notebooks so there’s no spiral binding to fuss with before recycling it.
I have dabbled at all of the above practices, even keeping at some of them for several days in a row, but then I think of the ones I’m not doing, and as the list of things I think I should do before breakfast gets longer, I get hungrier. And that’s how I so often end up just skipping it all. It doesn’t help that I have rather strong night-owl tendencies and seldom rise before 8:30 or so.
But I have noticed that my day seems to go better, and my body tends to feel better, when I do at least some of those things in the morning. So today I walked up the stairs (once), did one set of sun salutations (using a chair to make it easier—that is, possible), then sat down at my work table and wrote my three morning pages with a lovely fountain pen, punctuated at the end with a few doodles. It all took just over half an hour and then I had a fine breakfast.
Some days recently, I’ve been riding my bike to a local coffee shop after breakfast, with my computer, to work on things like this writing, and that’s starting to feel like a natural part of my morning routine too.
It's really a very pleasant way to start the day, however little or much I manage to do—some before breakfast and some after.
