Help, I think I love mornings
Look at this beautiful 8:30am view from my window.
Of course it’s when I no longer work full-time that I suddenly blossom into a morning person lah kan. When did that happen, seriously? I wish it struck me earlier. I only realised my body wanted mornings when I realised I kept waking up before my alarm. My alarm app is from a past life of night owlery — it only turns off when three long math questions are answered correctly. Annoying as all hell, but it worked.
These days, I get up and turn that off before it even goes off. I don’t get grumpy from doing the math. And then somehow or another, I stay awake. It was easy and organic. At first, it started with flipping over to read the news belly down in bed at my laptop. And then I found myself looking for other things to do that didn’t involve a screen. Reading in bed. Sorting out laundry. Thinking of breakfast — usually some muesli, yogurt, and fruit stirred into a jar the night before. I took up yoga. And then I realised yoga goes really well with being a morning person. It goes really really well with being a ritual person too.
From Viktor Cahoj and Devon Burns’ short film series on morning rituals. Halfway through this video I realised: Wow, I still have a long way to go. But I want all my mornings to be like this next year: Simple and strong. I wonder if this is a direction my easy and organic transition can head. It can no longer be easy, I suppose. I start by accepting I am a morning person now, so I can be actively present in every morning I wake up in. Being pleasantly surprised at some passive pattern gradually emerging doesn’t cut it. That’s not what I see in the video.
As I experiment with ways to start my mornings, I grow increasingly fond of finding certainty in days strengthened by rituals. It looks a little like this:
- Grow habits.
- Observe where they coalesce, merge, or flow together.
- Use observation to further understanding of both, and then
- Stir said understanding gently into everything.
When I stirred into my life a diet of YouTube yoga videos over a year ago (1) (2) (3), it inadvertently affected my relationship with prayer. Yoga practice became an ingredient in developing my faith practice, beyond its grumpy rough patch of the born-Muslim kid compelled by all authority figures to do this prayer thing real quick five times a day memorised in a beautiful foreign language OR HELLFIRE.
I think it’s because yoga and Muslim prayer share a delicate and important commonality: Are they not each a practice of repetitive yogic movements paired with mindfulness and intention?
What also comes to mind is that quote about prayer, self, and faith — supposedly by Mother Teresa — that parallels my relationship with yoga, body, and health:
“I used to believe that prayer changes things, but now I know that prayer changes us, and we change things.”
I think this time last year, I was starting to accept that full-time work wasn’t working for me.
Rushed showers, morning traffic, sedentary screen-staring, dinner traffic, socialising, solo screen-staring, sleep. It was the most unnatural way to force ritual into my life. Maybe at 27, my body now wants mornings because it wants a new ritual. I want rituals too. For a freaking change. Something simple amd strong. Something to start my morning off at first, and then organically creep through my day, every day. Eventually next year, any given day will be supported from dawn to dusk by a series of physical movements, strengthened from vines to pillar to spine mode.
I imagine it to be a framework to grow certainty in all aspects of my life — uncharted territory, really — and something to contrast its madness against, so my days don’t run wild crackling chaos by themselves, naked into the dark.
There’s something rewarding in distilling a ritual from a series of organic patterns, then reinforcing it by being more and more who I think I could be. I’ve only just started to accept my life really does need this kind of support and strength. Waking up to this transition (literally) is a point of gratitude I can now bring to the mat in more ways than one. When there’s no compulsion, good change feels like a sexy gift of steady effort. And in there perhaps, is a next opportunity to stir gently into everything.
