Much gratitude to Benjamin Faust for his awesome photo on Unsplash.

To Hell With the Old Gutterball Loop

Start your new year with an early morning routine that embraces daydreaming, planning, and joyful expectation

Fear is my gutterball.

It probably has been from a very early age.

And I sure as hell have been throwing my share of frames’ worth lately.

I’m coming out of a fog of holiday dread and confusion, worried about the state of the world as well as that of my own friends and family. Aging brings health worries added to economic worries, which become a pile-on of anxiety that would rattle the steadiest of us.

It hurts to admit this, but the frustration has reached the point where I needed to slow down, breathe, focus on the pins in front of me, and center that ball straight down the alley. Even after multiple gutterballs.

It’s a weekend morning, but even so I got up early — just like my late father, Paul, used to do, even on mornings when he didn’t have to go to work.

I can still hear him happily humming to himself while making coffee in the kitchen, before disappearing into his inner sanctum — the den — to switch on the radio, listen to news and music, and generally plan his day. I was then in my early teens and, as teenagers tend to do, I was a night owl and hugely put off by Dad’s early morning routine. Even though I loved the smell of coffee brewing and Mom cooking breakfast, the whole “up before sunrise” thing was a bridge too far.

Now that I have the perspective of years (I’m now older than my father was in the early 1970s), I see now how vital Dad’s predawn ritual was to his mental well-being and overall productivity.

This became clearer to me while chatting with a friend recently, when I told him I was feeling down over the holidays. “Are you focusing on today?” he asked, “Or thinking about the future?” I was dwelling on unknowable what ifs and feeling overwhelmed — even a bit defeated — by them.

“Just think about the day ahead,” my friend said. “Only do what you need to do … what you can accomplish now.”

It was great advice.

So I’m acting on it here, now.