Win the Morning Before Fear Does
Some nights I lie down tired enough to sleep and still catch myself wondering whether I will wake up in the morning. I think about my health, my work, and whatever I may have left unprepared for the next day. Nothing has to happen in the room for those thoughts to start. I can be lying there while my mind looks for a problem and then, having found one, starts working on it like it is getting paid.
I am not writing this as a man who beat that. I am writing it as a man who learned what to do in the morning instead.
The routine, as it actually goes
I wake up and open the bedroom window. I look outside and give thanks that I woke up to another day. Fear may have spent all night telling me what I could lose; now I have a morning in front of me, and I want to notice that I am here. Then I weigh myself and look at the number on the scale, whether it held, dropped, or rose. I use it to pay attention to how I am taking care of myself, remembering that one morning’s number cannot explain everything happening in my body.
I make my bed. I make coffee and put the news on for company. I do my exercises, thirty push-ups and thirty leg raises, and take care of what my doctor asked me to take care of. Then I sit down at the computer and look at my finances: I enter the numbers into my spreadsheet and see where the account stands against what I have been spending. I can worry vaguely about money all night. In the morning I can look at it.
My morning has become a way to care for the life I’m afraid of losing. Making the bed, taking care of my morning, looking at the numbers: those give me work I can finish while the larger questions stay open. You don’t have to feel fearless for those actions to count.
Why it works when the fear doesn’t leave
None of this guarantees how the day ends. What it does is give the day a beginning that includes me doing something instead of only dreading something. When I skip the routine I feel out of sync, which taught me to value it, though I try not to let a useful habit become one more thing I failed at before eight o’clock. Work can call before I am finished. The routine exists to help me receive the day, not to grade me on it.
If you want a place to start, start smaller than mine. Open a window and say thank you. Make the bed. Look at one number. Do it seven mornings and mark each one. You don’t need my routine. You need a beginning that fits the morning you actually have.
Keep Climbing Now: Nobody Builds the Tenth Floor First. Thirty-nine short chapters. Every one ends on the ground with something to do about it.