It’s the summer. I should be kicking back, lying in, relishing long mornings without the tyranny of the ticking clock telling me to chug back the coffee and get on the road before the school bell chimes, YOU’RE LATE!
But instead, I’m feeling bad about not filling these extra minutes with more activity. Since I don’t have to scarper before half eight, I SHOULD have time for an energising yoga routine, maybe some journalling (I never actually journal), and perhaps a stroll around the block to in take the refreshing morning air.
Once I clicked ‘Like’ and saved a video of the aforementioned daily stretches, and now my Insta feed is choc-a-bloc with other ways to enhance my mornings and boost my productivity.
Likewise, are the daily affirmations which flash up, telling me that ‘I’m enough’, …. And some days, when I’ve spent an hour mindlessly scrolling, I don’t feel enough at all. I feel like I’m wasting my life. I need to put down the phone and start actually living.
And when I feel that I should be implementing all the things the Insta-gurus tell me, it all becomes noise in my head. Too much noise, droning out the other stuff which is just as important.
Case in point: the other morning, I got up and headed downstairs with the intention of doing the stretches. But the Small Child was already up and ensconced on the sofa and JOY OF JOYS she had tuned on the telly and found an episode of Gilmore Girls that we HADN’T YET SEEN! Oh, but the bliss. We put a blanket over our knees and I fished some Nesquik bars out of the fridge and we munched in companiable silence and a cat joined us and it was altogether lovely.
I didn’t do the yoga and I didn’t sit on the floor as it’s more beneficial for the hips and I drank coffee, not ‘lion’s mane blend for concentration.’ And this is what I’ll remember about summer- a million times more than a few downward dogs. And no, I’m not saying that yoga’s not good, just that when I become a bit obsessed with ‘self-betterment’ it gets in the way of spontaneity. And in a few years, when the girls have upped and left and it’s just me on my mat in the morning, I might remember, with quiet joy, the episode where Kirk got blinded by a speed camera and careened straight through the window of Luke’s diner. Is that not what a morning in early August is about?
