Rhythm of my Days

Here we are at the beginning of another year. It’s a good time to try to be objective about how my life is going and decide of I want to make any changes. This year – I couldn’t come up with anything substantial that I wanted to change so I decided to look more methodically – what are the rhythms of my days, my weeks, and my seasons within the year. This is the first post of the series.

The rhythm of my days are mostly habits. Some are longstanding:

• Getting up before 6 AM and being in bed by about 10. I feel better and enjoy my days more when the sleep/wake cycle is almost the same every day.
• I eat my meals at about the same time every morning…trying to have the largest meal as midday although that is not always possible. It is easier now that when I was away from home most days during my career.
• Reading ‘books’. I always have a book I am reading and that has been a long standing daily activity. IT was physical books…but somewhere along the line became more and more digital.

Some are additions since I’ve retired:

• A daily blog post. I write it and schedule it to come out the night before. When I travel, I double up before I go and the posts still come out once a day.
• Zentangle and meditation. They are two separate things. They both provide an interlude of centering…of drawing myself completely into the present. The creation of Zentangle tiles is a pleasant byproduct.
• 12,000 steps is my goal for each day (measured via a Fitbit). The way I get them can vary. Many times, it includes ‘bounces’ on my Swopper chair in front of the computer. I ramped up before I retired but the activity level became a lot more consistent once I was not in the thick of career related activities.
• Writing 3,000 words a day just became a goal in 2016. It got easier as the year progressed. The goal includes words written for the blog post, writing about the events of the day, and notes from classes ----really anything I want to write about.

What is not part of my daily rhythm that once was?

• Reading a newspaper. These days I use news feeds from multiple sources and it’s a more technical skew that newspapers had.
• The evening news. I watch some stories while I fix or eat dinner – but very rarely watch a full program. Looking back, there were many periods that I did not watch news…because I was too busy. I remember listening to The News Hour when my daughter was young (20 years ago) because at that time it was not graphic – it was interviews without pictures to back them up – so was something we could watch while she was with us.

The rest of the day is full of other activities that differ from day to day, week to week, etc. As I wrote this post, I surprised myself with how many items are ‘daily’ for me. I still haven’t discovered anything I want to change in 2017!