Good
Morning
“There
are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its color
and its fire to match the nature of the day, so do I.”
John
Steinbeck
Are there
days when the alarm screeches, you open your eyes and just know “it’s going to
be one of those days.” You get out of bed, trip over the dog, stagger into the
bathroom to throw some cold water on your face, then look in the mirror. “Oh,
Lord!” you say, “who the heck is that!” Your opal just turned brown and the
fire went completely out, and your entire day may do the same. I’ve had more
than a few of those days, myself. It’s not pretty.
On the
other hand, when you rouse yourself without an alarm going off in your ears,
get out of bed slowly, take your time going into the kitchen to turn on the
coffee maker, then take your cup outside and listen to the trill of a towhees
and mocking birds—now this will be different kind of day.
Morning
is an important time, and how you approach it sets the stage for the rest of
the day to be either good or stressful. Most of us don’t have the luxury of
lounging, but we also don’t have to yank ourselves from sleep and fling ourselves
into a “terrible, awful, no good, very bad day.” Alarm clocks that buzz,
jangle, screech or otherwise make nasty sounds, should be banned from the earth.
(Just an opinion.) They turn ordinary people into seething monsters in a
nanosecond. If you must have an alarm, make it music, or nature sounds. Just as
we go through a routine at bedtime that tells our body it’s time for sleep, we
can develop a routine in the morning that lets it know it’s time to wake up and
get going, but does so gently.
The way
we wake ourselves with alarms is inherently violent. It programs us to expect an
assault to our senses and activates our sympathetic nervous system accordingly.
In this time of external stress, we need to be mindful of how we treat
ourselves so that we don’t exacerbate our agitation. We can calm our nervous system
simply by waking to each new day in a way that soothes us, rather than catapults
us into waking with a racing heart and adrenalin pumping.
Even
when the world around us is chaotic, we can be kind to ourselves and each other.
Starting the day with gentleness makes all the difference in whether this will
be “one of those days,” or “what a beautiful day!” I hope your opal is bright this
morning.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
No comments:
Post a Comment