Most of my mornings start the same way: Visit the restroom, eat a Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip G2G Bar, scroll on some mind-numbing app.
For the last few years, that’s been the pattern. It’s not noble or anything I’d post about on FaceXTokGramChat. It’s just how my day starts.
And for several years, my morning ritual also included a run — usually no less than four miles, and often a lot more. I logged 1,400 miles a couple of years ago; 200 of those in December. I wasn’t training for anything. I just ran because it helped me clear my head. For me, the power of the long run was that I get to a point where all I can think about is breathing and moving my legs. Running also feels like progress.
Now, in the thick of trying to build two businesses, I rarely run. Unfortunately, I’ve also given in to a bit more scrolling. I shower. I work. There are way too many days when I’m seated at my desk by 5:00 a.m. and am sometimes there until after 9:00 p.m.
The running shoes still sit in my closet.
The shift from running to scrolling happened abruptly, and it’s part of a bigger pattern that has developed in my life. My life is full of routines, but not all of them feel like mine. At least, not anymore.
Some of them feel like last week’s leftovers — things I started doing because they felt like they served a purpose. Even the scrolling, I realized, was because my life was so stressful and I needed escape. Others feel like obligations — things I keep doing because stopping always feels like giving up. There are others that are just placeholders. The reflex-reach that happens when I don’t have the energy to think about what matters.
I have 9 email addresses. I check my “unified inbox” 40 or 50 times a day. Not because I need to. Most of the time, nothing urgent or important is waiting. I do it because I’ve trained myself to seek that little hit of responsibility — proof that I’m useful, needed, productive.
Most of the time, those emails could have waited. Many didn’t need me at all.
But I still check.
It’s strange how we can turn our routines into a kind of performance, isn’t it? We take something that has an air of diligence to it but really it’s just a distraction. A kind of ambient motion that keeps us from feeling too much stillness. Too much quiet.
I don’t know when I became afraid of stillness.
Now, I’m trying to notice more of those moments when my habit for motion drifts into autopilot. The rituals that lost their meaning somewhere along the way. The unspoken (sometimes spoken) rule that I have to earn rest by first being exhausted.
Somewhere along the way, I confused motion with value. I mistook volume for importance. I let the daily list of to-dos become a meaningless proxy for progress — like staying in motion equaled moving forward.
But there’s a cost to all that momentum.
And I’m starting to feel it in my bones.
Perhaps paradoxically, I’ve started to wonder what it would look like to protect some of the routines and be more intentional about them instead of replacing them. What would it mean to revisit some of those rituals and actually give them meaning again? Not every moment has to be sacred, but maybe some of them could be — if I gave them a little more care.
It’s funny. I keep coming back to folding laundry. That one shows up a lot in my stories — because it’s real and it works. It grounds me, but doesn’t really solve anything — except for the dirty laundry problem. For a day.
The same can be said of cleaning the kitchen. Making beds.
They’re little acts that serve as reminders of what really matters.
There’s something to that. A kind of anchor when the climbing gets scary. When everything else feels uncertain, there’s always a pair of socks to match. A counter to wipe clean. A family to feed.
That’s the part I want to remember.
When I treat routines as obligations, particularly unwanted ones — just tasks to survive the day — I lost sight of why I started doing them in the first place. They become mechanical. Hollow. Mindless.
And, honestly, that’s okay sometimes. Not every T-shirt folded needs to be a reminder of some grand plan. It’s okay for laundry to be drudgery sometimes.
But when I treat those routine things a bit more like rituals — small ways of returning to myself and my values — something changes. That’s when they become grounding instead of draining.
That’s what I’m trying to hold onto now: the idea that routines don’t have to be a trap. They can be a choice. A slow, intentional return to what I actually care about.
Routines have an interesting way of saying this matters — even if no one notices or acknowledges.
I love the thought that routines can be a kind of quiet rebellion against chaos. Gentle reminders that life doesn’t have to be a sprint to earn our worth. Maybe a nudge toward more intentionality and less efficiency.
There will always be laundry to fold. Email to check. Dinner to make. Work to do. The same things that filled yesterday and will fill tomorrow. But maybe I don’t need to perform my way through them. Maybe I can just show up a little better and let that be enough.
I’m not good at this… yet. I still over-program my days. I still forget the quiet insights I have in the morning when things start spinning out of control by 9:00 a.m. I still chase the fallacy that more is better. That movement is progress. That speed equals strength.
Sometimes, the canyon is dark and I need to light a few metaphorical candles in the middle of it all.
I’m not trying to be dramatic, just trying to remember. That the person I’m working on becoming is shaped in the middle of the repetition — in how I treat the ordinary.
It’s hard, sometimes, to remember that I don’t need a breakthrough to be present.
Small moments still count — probably more. Especially the quiet ones I used to scroll through.
I’m still figuring out which routines need to go and which ones need to stay. There are so many that are just noise dressed up as diligence. There are a few of them I want to protect and a few I want to build again. And this time, I want them to mean something.
I’m not looking for the guru mountaintop grand epiphany. Just enough light to remember the way back to myself.
And if that starts with the same G2G bar, the same four-mile run, or the same five minutes of silence each morning — so be it.
It doesn’t have to be extraordinary.
It just needs to be mine.
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