Sunny, a Diné storyteller that I recently spent the week with in New Mexico, told me that writing one’s own story is the most important thing. That it must be done everyday. She gifted me a pen, which immediately broke in my backpack, and that became my excuse for continuing not to write. But lately I’ve been feeling like I’m without a compass, an anchor, a foundation. Whenever that happens, I think about how long it’s been since I’ve written something besides an email, and the distance from that is usually vast. It’s been almost a year since I started this blog, only to abandon it after a handful of posts. It has been a year of absolute fullness, and actually overwhelming fullness, but one that I also realize won’t be logged without me. So let’s see how this goes.
This year has been one of establishing and dissolving routines.
Each morning I:
- Drink a big thing of water that I boiled the night before. It’s a habit my mom got me on a year ago, and she made me do it with a specific thermos that her friends plugged her on. She says that the fancy, higher-quality canteens that you see everyone with these days are too good at trapping heat, so you’ll still burn your tongue the next morning. The cheap one leaks out just enough to flush out all the nasty. Later, I also found out that Nelson Mandela did it too (I can’t remember where I learned that and when I tried to search all I found was this, so…)
- Meditate. Okay, this is something that I’ve picked up several times in my life and dropped time and again, just like writing. But this time my streak has been for almost two years, which is amazinggggg. Each period I’ve meditated has been completely different. The time I miss the most is after my friend Sun (not to be mistaken for Sunny) held my hands in a hotel room in Minneapolis and told me that she saw all my past lives lined up behind me. After that, each night I sat in the dark in front of a candle, I’d imagine roots sprouting from the pads of my feet and light beaming from the top of my head, and within minutes I’d open my eyes to the world vibrating. That was back in 2011. Nowadays, I can’t even close my eyes for 3 minutes without thinking about whether I need to get a new to-do list app to replace my current to-do list app. But still, I try for 20 minutes a day, in the morning. My friend Nai`a recently launched a series of guided meditations which have been an awesome balance to my brain’s increasing similarity to a rabid chihuahua trapped in a small dumpster.
- Do OG Chinese ppl stretches. Like meditation, my stretches is a reminder that whenever I think I’m onto some new elevated shit, it’s something that I was actually feeling new and elevated about years ago. When I was living in New York, I biked from Brooklyn to Manhattan Chinatown every morning to do tai chi with the elders in Hester St. Playground. I was taking it hella seriously, even spending my Sunday mornings in an old ballroom studio training with a master. They’d tell me that the young guys would always come around and stay for just a few months before disappearing, and I swore that I was way more on point than those losers. Then I disappeared. Now I’m back on it, more out of physically necessity than chasing some elevated image of myself like I was in my 20’s. Here’s how I got restarted.
- Hand pour my coffee. This is some hipster shit that I’m sure when I have kids and actual responsibilities I’ll reflect on and wonder why I spent so many precious hours of my life pouring water in slow swirls. Or maybe not. I like the idea of beginning my day with something mundane and inconvenient, but that comes out better than if it was just automated. My friend Nafisa, who doesn’t drink coffee, mentioned that alternating the direction you pour into the grinds helps stir better, so I worked that in too. On a day like this when I’m not feeling like I have a billion things to do, it feels like I’m tending to a zen garden. A pretentious, drinkable zen garden.
- Morning poop. It’s hella necessary. Just know that if you make me be somewhere before 10am you’re disrupting my entire biology.
Time management continues to be a struggle. In the best of mornings, included in my routine are also writing my declarations and intentions for the day, journaling, making a beat on my drum machine, and getting all this done while being an attentive husband. I’m still coming to terms with how I can anchor myself but remain flexible and not a diva when my mornings can’t be what I wish them to be. I’m also learning that these routines can’t be done as a means to an end. I lose my track whenever I do this expecting some kind of return like increased productivity or establishing the beginning of a good day. The best excuse I’ve found for following this regimen is that it’s a very noble alternative to waking up and immediately zapping my brain with the internet. For me to have agency at least in the first hour of my day and before I step into the chaos.