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On Morning and Evening Routines

I have this routine I do in the morning now. I wake up, and after bumbling around in a bit of a fog, I settle down and I stretch my neck. (Specifically, for all you bodywork types, I stretch my scalenes, which are the ropelike muscles on the side of the poor apparatus that has the burden of holding your thick, heavy skull up.) Then I meditate for a few moments (often doing my cheat-y meditations) and then do a bit of cheat-y yoga, too. And then I make a cup of something caffeinated and then settle down to write, whether it’s on my personal creative work or my job assignments.

The writing is the work, of course, but leading up to it is important. The routine is what launches me into the writing; it’s like a nice little platform or foundation for the day. Interestingly enough, the most important part of the routine are the neck stretches, not the meditation or the caffeine. (Those things are definitely nice, though!) I can truncate or skip the beverage or the Yoda mindfulness stuff, but if I skip the neck stretches, all hell breaks loose in terms of my day’s output. It’s a weird, pedestrian yet quasi-mystical thing, this morning routine.

It sounds very high-minded when I write it down, but honestly it is actually super-practical: the stretches and yoga are to counteract the beginnings of carpal tunnel I began experiencing late last year. (A lot of hand/wrist pain is related to very tight scalenes and sunken chest muscles, apparently.) A massage therapist I went to suggested to stretch out my super-tight neck muscles morning and evening — and yes, it makes a difference for my particular body. I started doing the neck stuff, and then just plastered on other things that felt nice, experimenting with the order, etc. And lo and behold — morning routine! And I didn’t even make a resolution to find one! Score!

But I’ve always had a fascination with people’s routines for the morning and evening. There’s something so personal and intimate about how people begin and wind down their days and evenings to me — something beautifully ordinary and yet very idiosyncratic. I love hearing how people deal with the practicalities of food, eating, caffeine and exercise while still trying to incorporate their creative and intellectual passions into their lives.

There’s something both humbling and inspiring about hearing how legit creative geniuses start their day, and there’s no predicting who does what in the morning. James Joyce apparently would get up at 10 but stay in bed, breakfasting and occasionally talking with his tailor, until 11 or so. Then he would get up, shave and then play the piano before he got down to the business of creating modernist prose. (This makes me feel better when I try to wake early to work on my novel and suddenly instead decide that clearing out my magazine piles and restringing my guitar are a better use of my time.)

Others are intimidatingly productive. Ben Franklin was a famously busy polymath, but found an hour every morning nevertheless to read while naked, a practice he called “air baths.” Le Corbusier started early with 6am gymnastics and painting, while Haruki Murakami gets up at 4am, writes for 5-6 hours, then goes running in the afternoon. Twyla Tharp mentions in her book The Creative Habit that she takes a cab to the gym hella early every morning to work out with a trainer to start her day. The important part of the routine isn’t the workout, it’s the cab, she specifies, which I loved.

Interestingly enough, there isn’t as much info out there on evening routines as there is for mornings — maybe because evenings feel more intimate, I’m not sure. I’m trying to find the evening equivalent of my morning routine, but surprisingly, that’s proved more elusive, and I haven’t quite settled on anything yet. Perhaps it’s because I haven’t quite figured out what the purpose of the nighttime routine is. If morning routines are to create idylls of quiet and focus, or perhaps momentum and energy — depending on who you are and what you need — then what are evenings for? To wind down? Empty your mind? Relax? Set yourself up for the next day? (For me, it should probably involve squelching the impulse to squeeze more out of the day.)

I haven’t figured out what I particularly need from my nighttime routine yet. But it’s cool. Hopefully it’ll happen as organically as the morning routine did. If there’s anything I’ve learned, routines that bookend your day are a unique extension of the person practicing them — and you can’t top-down force uniqueness, of course…it’s an inside-out thing.

Years That Ask Questions and Years That Answer

Ah, yes, a happy new year — a fresh beginning, a set of resolutions, a word-of-the-year, a reset/renew, a detox, a turning of the page. Only, for me, not this round.

Don’t get me wrong: I still did my little hippie productivity yearly planner, I still set up my little time-keeping/scheduling system, I have goals and desires and things I’d like to accomplish. But in 2015, I’m cutting myself some slack.

Not that I’m pooh-poohing anyone who’s embarking on a type-A super-planning kind of thing in terms of setting up their new year. There are some years that call for that — years where time is malleable, putty in your hands, able to be molded and filled with whatever your endeavor. Where intention and action align with ease, and everything on your to-do list seems to expand and move you to growth.

I think of these as kind of “Athenian” years — you know, after the Greek goddess of wisdom, the great war strategist and city-builder and patroness of craftspeople, the great grey-eyed lady of discernment and skilled action. These are years that weave threads into fabric, fabric into useful shapes and garments — years that build, solidify, consolidate.

But then there are other kinds of years. To keep with the Greek goddess groove (bear with me here, I’m feeling Jungian!), perhaps you could call some years “Persephone” years — years of walking in shadow, treading the underworld, confronting fears, anxieties, sadness and unresolved wounds and griefs.

(Of course, you can expand this whole metaphor towards the entire mythological pantheon — I’ve definitely had my Artemisian years of trawling the psychological wilderness in a glorious solitude, as well as those super-fun, glamorous Aphrodite years of romance, good times and carousing!)

Looking back at my 2014, though, I realized a lot of my angst was wanting to have an Athenian year so badly, but being immersed in a huge Persephone kind of year. Beyond the actual specifics of the circumstances and events, underneath I was grappling with a sense of disappointment and failure that my intentions were so derailed. I still did a lot of what I wanted, but I also was so overwhelmed with stress, anxiety and fear that I couldn’t savor any accomplishment or experience very much. It kind of sucked. There’s no use knocking off items on your bucket list or to-do list or whatever if the experience of them is so clouded and polluted with negative emotions.

So for 2015, yes, I still have intentions and goals and such, but I’m holding onto them lightly. Already, looking ahead, I can see huge mountains to scale on the path. The big changes set into motion last year are still unfolding, and even bigger ones are coming — ones whose outcomes and tranformations I can’t predict in the least. In the face of such challenges, I think all I can do is be present as possible, be kind and gentle to myself and others around me and have as much fun and joy as I can. I think that’s just the perfect amount of enough to begin my New Year.

Zora Neale Hurston actually has one of my favorite quotes about years, and it’s one that gives the title to this post:

There are years that ask questions, and years that answer.

Whatever year you desire, I hope yours is off to a beautiful start!

Against Busyness

I have been reading Brigid Schulte’s Overwhelmed: Work and Play When You Have No Time recently, and enjoying it thoroughly. It is one of those books that looks like one thing but is almost another: it looks like a productivity/business/personal development book on the surface, but it is also a rich cultural history of time, leisure and what constitutes a good life.

There’s so much to recommend about it: it’s sharply written, well-researched, and does a phenomenal job of tracing how these “natural” ideas about time and productivity are deeply tied to gender, economics and other factors in social context. I’m really enjoying it thoroughly, to the point where I kind of don’t want to return it to my local library! It’s a real smartypants read, but very accessible and non-academic.

But this isn’t a smartypants review of it. Because, as I was reading it, I noticed my underlying emotional reaction and realized it was: Boy, am I so happy I don’t relate to this book! Which was weird, and worthy of deconstruction.

It was kind of embarrassing thing to realize. Schulte writes a lot about herself in the book, in a good way — her harried juggling of her work as a reporter for the Washington Post, her marriage, her childrearing, her householding. But it wasn’t that I didn’t relate to her role overload — I have plenty to do and lots of projects, relationships, and priorities to manage. It was that I realized: I’m not that frenzied anymore. I don’t periodically announce, “I’m so busy!” like I used to when I was living in New York.

If you read the book, you know how insanely profane such a statement is. No matter who you are or what you do, you must be busy. Or, you just aren’t important, a successful human being. If you aren’t busy, you are lame, a slacker, not fulfilling your potential. And reading Overwhelmed, I felt maybe there was something a little wrong with me. And then I opened my hippie productivity planner and tried to find a list to make. (List-making makes me feel very important to myself.) It was a bit of a crisis, oddly: am I not fulfilling my human potential? Am I wasting precious time? Am I a loser?

But then I backtracked, slowed down, stopped the shame spiral. Not-busyness for me, I realized, is the end result of many major shifts and decisions, some of which I’ve covered here. My notions of success have changed; my desire to have different kind of relationships as well. Changing my approach to finances and prosperity played a role in keeping me less busy. It wasn’t a deliberate move, but slowly I reconfigured my life towards a less frenetic, jam-packed existence.

I’ve always been deeply interested in our experiences of time, and have written about kairos time (the way we “lose” time when we’re immersed in something we love doing) vs. chronos time (the sense of time represented by stopwatches, deadlines). I guess you can say I’ve made more of an effort to shift my life to privilege kairos time: time that hasn’t been sliced up by distraction or obligation or competing priorities. I’ve refused well-paying jobs that demanded 60-70 hours workweeks, for example. I moved from New York, which reduced my expenses considerably and gives me more flexibility in the type of work I take. I don’t work in film anymore, or any job that requires significant “face time” on someone else’s schedule. I’m very privileged to be able to be in a position to make these decisions, but it wasn’t like I had it right away — I chipped away at it slowly, incrementally. And this affects my finances, my social network and my opportunities. But it also gives me swathes of beautifully open kairos time. Reading Schulte’s book makes me realize what a rare approach this is. Or perhaps not rare, but not framed in these notions of kairos vs. chronos.

(You may think “Big deal!” but kairos time is vitally important to our happiness and perhaps to our progress overall. Kairos is where we invent stories, innovations, works of art. Our brains need kairos time to fully rest and revitalize — just grabbing a quarter-hour of rest here and there won’t truly relax you. Schulte makes the sharp observation that socially, historically, and culturally, institutions and individuals have privileged men’s kairos time over women’s — she has loads of historical and statistical information in Overwhelmed, and makes a strong case for time as a feminist issue.)

Ironically, as I was reading Overwhelmed, I actually did consult my planner and agenda a lot less than usual. Partly because it’s kind of senioritis season and a lot of major projects and work stuff wrapped up, but maybe, after reading so much about the toxic effects of our cultural elevation of busyness, I was just more well-aware of the larger imperative to fill our lives to the brim with perfectionism, over-achievement and fueling acquisition. I wanted the mental space to think about what’s important — after all, no one’s eulogy or obituary will ever read, “And you know what else was so awesome about this person? They were so busy!” And so I closed the book when I was done and felt relieved. If I don’t directly relate to Overwhelmed, I must be doing something right!

On Squeezing the Last Dregs of the Day

In Which I Give Myself a Guilt Trip, Can’t Sleep and Come to Some Epiphanies About Compassion, Productivity and Insomnia

I’ve been sleeping not so great lately. I do this weird thing where I collapse in my bed at the end of the day because I’m super tired, and I just want to close my eyes and pass out. But my mind races, still in go-go-go daytime mode even though I’m supposed to enter into chill zone. And yet I can’t stop my brain. Did I edit this piece of writing? Did I email So-and-So back? Did I get XY and Z done? I didn’t, so maybe I should stay up just a bit later so i can start tomorrow with that wide-open buoyant feeling, instead of hitting the day feeling already behind. Oh, but I should just go to sleep. But well, wouldn’t it be nice to just get more stuff done?

And it goes on, and suddenly it’s an hour later and I’m still arguing with myself and I really should’ve just gone to sleep — but my internal argument has turned into a major fit of annoyance and aggravation, most of which is directed at myself. Bleh!

As a chronic insomniac, this is kind of bad news because it’s the mental pattern I fell into when I was living in NYC, doing film and school stuff and being that kind of person that runs around and constantly has somewhere to go and has to ridiculously schedule breakfast just to see my friends. The weird thing is that I don’t live like that anymore, so what the heck is going on?

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