You can never tell where you’ll find the things that will save you.
The other day, an article from Employee Benefits News found its way into one of my feeds. The article — “Morning routines are the secret sauce to getting the most out of your remote days” — contained this bit of brilliant, if grammatically incorrect, advice:
The foundation of morning routines are [sic] starting off your day with small wins that create a sense of accomplishment that carries over into the rest of the day. Even making your bed can be a small win … prompting yourself with an action will help you stick to a morning routine more easily. For example, putting your clothes out the night before could help you exercise more consistently.
Probably because I’m so dense, I still have a little trouble figuring out how putting my clothes out the night before will help me exercise more consistently. Put them out where? I prefer to keep my clothing in the house, and the last person I knew who had a clothesline was my mother. That was a while ago.
I also couldn’t figure out what kind of exercise putting my clothes out would help me do. If I put them out far enough, I suppose I could get in a brisk jog to wherever I put them. Or maybe I’m supposed to put them in something really heavy. In that case, moving whatever it is I’m supposed to put them out in would constitute exercise. I don’t know.
Onward
Rather than trying to decide where and how far to put my clothes out, I decided to extend my morning routine. Before reading the article, I’d believed getting conscious, getting vertical, getting clean, and getting caffeinated was enough. How naïve.
The only thing I could tell was meaningfully lacking from my morning routine was a hearty breakfast. So, I now bound out of bed and get cleaned up. Then, as the mercifully grown, Fair Trade coffee’s brewing, I go about preparing:
- Pasture-raised eggs (scrambled or fried) from chickens the diets of which consist only of corn-fed cows.
- Whole wheat toast from which I diligently pick all the glutens the night before instead of putting my clothes out.
- Creamery fresh, unsalted, non-dairy butter made from the milk of non-dairy cows, the diets of which consist only of pasture-raised chickens.
- An all-natural, USDA Organic, sugar-and-high-fructose-corn-syrup-free jam, jelly, or preserve that I made and sealed in mason jars the last time I was unemployed.
Thereafter, I clean up the kitchen, scrub the pan, wash my plate and all the utensils, put everything away, and pour my second cup of coffee having successfully created a sense of accomplishment that carries over into the rest of the day. Yes. Saved.
A Footnote
Does anyone know or can anyone recall the point at which we had to be told to establish a morning routine, let alone to feel the need to publish articles about it? Didn’t most of us have parents? How old are the people who read Employee Benefits News?
When I read the article — “The Kindergarchy” — more than 14 years ago, I thought, “Well, that’s a tad extreme.” An excerpt:
No other generations of kids have been so curried and cultivated, so pampered and primed, though primed for what exactly is a bit unclear. Children are given a voice in lots of decisions formerly not up for their consideration. “If it’s your child, not you, who gets to choose your weekend brunch spot,” writes David Hochman in the magazine Details, “or if he’s the one asking how the branzino is prepared, it’s probably time to take a hard look at your own behavior.”
Presuming now it was neither extreme nor wrong, it goes a long way toward explaining “Morning routines are the secret sauce to getting the most out of your remote days.”
Maybe all of this seems needless, obvious, and ominous to me because my dad was a U.S. Marine. (If you didn’t have a morning routine, you’d think of one in mid-air as you were flying from the mattress that had just been pulled from beneath you.) Maybe it’s because I see it as matter of common sense and logic. Or maybe I’m just getting old. Again, I don’t know.
But I do know this: We’ve come a long way, Baby. And it feels like the wrong way.
