Early mornings.

Quiet house.

Endless possibilities.

Peace.

Time to do something not important…but also, so important.

For sanity. For growth. For space to breathe. To be. 

I treasure my morning time so much. I have had a hard time waking up early in my 20s and 30s. But thankfully, the 40s have changed it. Now staying in bed long is hard. I wake up with so much energy and drive that it feels torturous to lie in bed once I’m fully awake. I do like lingering for a few moments when my eyes are still lazy from sleep, and want to take their sweet time feeling awake. But after that…it’s out of the bed for me, and real fast too.

 Waking up early is another thing that I have struggled to accomplish over the years, but when the time was right, it came to me easy. This ease of being able to do something that I’ve had a hard time with in the past keeps affirming my belief in the “everything has a right time” mantra. I wonder if anyone else has had a similar experience with it.

Anyways, mornings are my time to write some morning pages, make me some warm lemon and salt water, plan out my day, go for a short walk and spend about 15 minutes on the mat doing some yoga or stretching. I do wake up my son in between all of these activities to make sure he’s ready in time for school. But the “real work” of making breakfast and getting ready comes after my mat time. And now my family has figured out that my sanity is connected to having had my alone time in the mornings. Which makes it easy to carve out this time for myself as no one feels the need to hang out with me if they wake up early as well. Win win!

Drawing boundaries, keeping time for self care, using it to soothe the brain and the body may sound like fluff, but they do the important job of making sure we are whole and ready to deal with challenges of daily life with calm and strength.

Because I have had my time to myself where I’ve been nurtured, I show up to my family from a place of  giving to them because I have first given to myself. The airplane oxygen mask analogy holds strongly in this case.

So morning routines, however short and simple they may be (in fact, short and simple is highly recommended for the sake of consistency), are important to start the day from the place of calm and completeness.

In my opinion.