Wake Up!

"... we recognize in ourselves the ability to wake up and also to return to a life of habit."    Michael Stone

To wake up.... or return to a life of habit... which will it be?

Pam says we are practicing being retired. So why am I getting up at 5am again. It's a habit, my normal routine for Wednesday, as it has been for two years. I walk to the Silver Spring studio of Willow Street Yoga for a 6:30am class, then walk a block to Starbucks with several of the group to get coffee and chat before I walk on to work.

Instead, after coffee today, I'll walk back home.

One of the unsettling aspects of the shutdown is that the routine of going to work is suddenly absent. The routine is a set of habits, life on autopilot, a default use of time that requires no thought, no decision. That is not to say that the routine is bad, or that all the habits are unhealthy or unproductive.  But they are not, in general, mindful.

Now the routine is absent, and that presents an opportunity to consider what is happening in my life right now, and what I want to do with it.

I'm not going to yoga today because it's a habit. I made a deliberate choice to go. I'm going because of relationships - both the relationship that I have with my yoga practice, and the relationships with my fellow yogis - a diverse, accomplished, and interesting group of people who practice yoga for an hour and then share conversation about what's going on in life before dispersing for another week. I find that quite grounding.

While the major external habits associated with the routine of work have been disrupted, compelling me to live differently, I still have a myriad of more internal habits to deal with -- patterns of thinking, how I occupy 'free time', what I turn to when I am restless, happy, unhappy, and on and on.

Those are the harder work.