For the past month or so, I've been trying to craft (for it is an act of craftsmanship) a morning routine for myself. In an ideal world, it would look something like this:

• wake up around 5:20am (kids usually wake up around 7am so this gives me ~1:30 hours),
• get up and to some yoga¹,
• go upstairs and make myself a coffee,
• drink coffee and write until kids get up.
  • it could either be journaling or blogging, or both, depending on how I feel

Of course, I almost never ever seem to be able to hit all of these. The one I struggle with the most is getting up and working out (either yoga or something else). I tend to stay in bed, procrastinating until it’s too late. Then, I get up to make coffee and write (which is easy because both of these are things I enjoy doing). The funny thing is that when I do manage to convince myself to work out, I always feel great afterward. The workout session itself is always light and enjoyable.

For the past week or so I've been reflecting on how curious it is that we're so strongly puppeteered by our emotions and feelings. When we want to do something we opt for trying to trick our emotions into aligning with what we want rather than using our willpower to assert control over ourselves.

I think we've all said to ourselves at one point or another something like "oh I'll do this thing I don't want to do and then I'll treat myself to some chocolate". It's a common mechanism we use to trick us into doing the things we want to do, by making these gatekeepers of things we do want.

Why is it so hard to put our foot down and do what we've decide we want / should do, rather than just following our internal state? We tend to think we have power over our minds but in reality it's our mind-body that has power over us—over what we do, how we feel, and how we treat others. We're all like house cats, letting our nature manipulate us and end up "fighting over a can of food when there's an identical can next to it". I know this all too well because, much of the time, I’m the first to fall into this trap, skimping on the things I should do just because I don’t feel like it.

We should treat our emotions the way Theoden (Saruman) treats Gandalf.

hehe...

though perhaps this is not the best example as Theoden (Saruman) is defeated by Gandalf, which stands for our emotions in this metaphor. Anyway... No metaphor is perfect.

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Footnotes

1. I've been following a YouTube channel called Yoga With Adriene which has a lot of great, beginner friendly yoga workouts. What I enjoy the most is that she has a bunch of 30-day yoga playlists so I don't really need to think much about what I want to do on a given day. Just do one playlist at a time. I'm grateful for her taking the time to making these, and making it as easy as possible to jump in. ↩