. . . I rose again out of bed and came downstairs to begin the day. I found my way to the meditation cushion this morning, but circuitously and late. One of my projects for myself post retirement (going on the third straight year and still not yet mastered) is the development of a routine, one that is consistent and not meandering. This morning, after letting the dogs outside and putting food in their bowls, I meandered into my stupid smart phone, and while I was getting the coffee pot ready (an activity at which I never fail), I read the texts, I checked the emails (both accounts), I looked briefly at the socials, I responded to the post of a friend, and I checked the news. Here is what I would prefer as a routine. Okay, the dogs can’t wait, and maybe get the coffee pot going, but after that I’d like to go straight to the cushion before going to the phone. I will send in a report to verify if tomorrow morning I am successful.
Routine. It is the one thing I have found wanting in my day to day; after 33 years of being on the strictest kind of routine imaginable as a public school teacher, I have been somewhat disconcerted by the sudden dropping away of something like a “schedule.” I feel like I need it, but at the same time, I don’t want to, and can’t be, really, a slave to a routine. Stuff comes up. Everyday can’t and shouldn’t be the same. There are errands to run. Places to go, people to see. I just feel like if I want to maximize the potential for each day, and be better about doing the things I want to do more of, it would behoove me to carve out a thing–even if it was just the morning part of the day. Like, wouldn’t it be amazing if I could do something like this:
- Get up! Shower, or not, depending on current state of crudescence.
- Take the dogs out. Feed dogs.
- Make coffee. (so far so good–I don’t think I have failed at these first three items in years! I’m almost always the first one up, and the first one up does the dog thing and the coffee thing.
- Meditate for at least 20
- Go for a walk or do some other kind of exercise. Probably walk. Shitty weather? Dress for it.
- Breakfast.
- Read some.
- Write some or do some clerical work–submitting to mags and contests, establishing and keeping track of submission deadlines.
- Then and only then, get out the stupid smart phone.
Rarely am I successful at this ideal morning schedule. After the coffee is made things typically go off the rails. Today, even after the early smart phone grab, I made it through the meditation bullet, skipped the walk, and then I went straight to breakfast. The walk happened later, but it was too short to be significant, a kind of fake-out for the dogs. I didn’t read. I wrote most of this little blog, the completion of which would have to wait for January 4.
But the rest of the day, the kind of “discretionary” block of my day-to-day life, was spent, happily, doing the things I love. René and I finished the tracking for the new Project MA single, I completed my first pass of a mix of the song, and then later into the evening, my cover band SuperWave played their largest and best paying venue to date, the Ponderosa Lounge, out there close to the Portland airport. Super lucky that the club had a decent drum set back line, so I didn’t have to haul my gear, but nevertheless the gig was exhausting–a lot of energy exerted, a lot of sweat, and when I got home around one o’clock in the morning, I felt a little bit like I had been hit by a truck. It didn’t help that as I was trying to leave the club, I couldn’t find my keys. Fortunately, this was not an indicator of my impending decrepitude, but rather (and this is not fortunate), my friend, the singer in the band, had accidentally put my keys in her purse. Recently, I’ve been driving a mini-cooper. She also drives a mini-cooper. She took a quick glance at my keys laying around in the green room, assumed they were hers, and she scooped them up! On the bright side, the rest of the band only spent about fifteen or twenty minutes scouring the club for my keys before she reached into her purse and found two sets for two different mini-coopers, one of which, happily, was mine.
michael jarmer 