Routines

My morning routine changes according to my school schedule; weekends, breaks, admin days, and the bone crushing personal development days. (Really strong coffee for those.) There are always a few constants, though. There is a workout (cardio and strength). There is coffee with or without cream depending on the type of day I am about to have. There is my time, usually at sunrise with said coffee, a journal, and my dogs. Time, most often, for creativity and mind reset. Quiet time before my world completely wakes up.

But that time has taken a new shape since March because loss and grief have that effect on me. My sunrise routine stopped. It felt wrong, off, broken; so, I stopped my morning meditations or whatever you would call them. Workouts remained, coffee remained. Well, only a masochist would stop coffee. But the mental resets, the quiet moments with my journal, my dogs, and the sunrise stopped. Cold turkey. Every time I thought about them, I found a reason why it wouldn’t work that morning. As time went on, it got easier. Change the routine. Move forward with other things and soon, you never thought about it anymore. Right?

Wrong. My mind was off. (At this point, I can hear my students thinking Her mind has been off for years. Or something along those lines. Possibly with several expletives thrown in.) All those other things I’d thrown myself into to not participate in my sunrises so I could forget. Wel, not forget, just ignore. Keep the memories, thoughts, losses from the forefront. If I ignored them and threw myself into other things, then I could pretend everything was a new normal. Yeah, it doesn’t work that way, but that technique seems to be a universal human go to. Whenever we experience loss, especially multiples that stack on top of each other like tons of emotional bricks, we humans tend to ignore, ignore, ignore so that we don’t have to think about, feel, or deal with what is weighing us down.

That’s what I’ve done since March. Since the final loss after losing two people who were more than just important to me within months of each other. A hole ripped out of my world. A safety net no longer there. My sunrise reflections became more about dealing with that pain and my dogs gave me comfort, helped me process, were starting to help me work through it all until my world blew up again in March. My beautiful daughter hurting in ways I couldn’t fix, couldn’t make better, which is what a mother is supposed to be able to do, right? We kiss the booboo and make it better, right? Then, one of the pillars of my morning routine was taken unexpectedly. So, I shut down.

Funny thing about shutting down, at some point you have to restart and the longer you put it off, the more difficult it becomes. Or so we tend to think. It’s not actually that the restart is difficult. It’s not really. Just take that step and hit the on switch. What’s hard is getting past the mental blocks that are masquerading as protection. This morning, I finally flipped that switch. It was different—the sunrise routine; but I knew it would be. I sat with my coffee and Annie, not on the sofa with a journal, but on the back deck; and I watched, instead of writing. I watched the rain on the mountains, the fine mist creeping across the fields and swirling over the pond, and a smaller version of the mist rising off my coffee; and I listened to the soft fall of the rain on my home’s metal roof, Annie’s breathing deepening into that fabulous bullmastiff snore, and the stillness of the morning.

It didn’t stop the ache. It didn’t make me forget. It simply helped me to pause and reset. And that’s a beginning.