Up & About: Morning Rituals

Mornings seem to have a continuous ritual and you notice this best if you walk to work, along with other moving entities. It all starts with the morning alarm and the time this is stopped, ranging from 3am to 5am, depending on the personality of the individual and whether he is a morning person or not (most of us aren't, yes, we know. By the way, a scientific experiment actually proved this, so take my word for it). 

 

The day starts with a challenge from its first moments: Where's the bathroom? Once you found the bathroom, you need to exercise your brain long enough to remember that the white porcelain thing is not your mug of coffee, but the toilet.  After this happens, you're obviously out in the open, because now, some of the activities seem to be coming back to memory.

 

The shower is a challenge unto itself. I am one of the happy dwellers that has a bath rather than a shower cabin and this means…yes, that you can sit down. Again, because you just got out of bad, where you were enjoying an almost similar reclining position. But it feels good to be sitting down again and, if some little voice inside your head is not whispering you to go to work, you might as well resume sleeping.

 

Shaving comes next. I am not sure why, in a world where safety regulations seem to be all over the place, we are allowed to handle sharp objects in sensitive neck areas at such an early moment of the day. Should that be allowed and, most important, can I sue the company (ANY company) for damaging my neck? Nevermind, I can put behind unreasonable thoughts such as this and concentrate on down, up, shave, and around. If I can get past this, I can go through anything today…

 

Already I am reaching unparalleled performance for the state of my mind this morning: I am shaved (yes, I know, I mentioned this so many times, but it is a performance), I have only cut myself in three different places and I have already adjusted the tie to match my shirt. Certainly, the lack of pants could have been a problem, good thing I noticed that before going out of the house. I remember that the previous evening I had made a mental list of all the things I needed to do this morning before going to work, including taking some promised things for some of the colleagues at work.  At the same time, it is most likely that I mentally threw the note out, so it's no real use trying to torture myself with this any longer…They'll just have to wait till tomorrow...

 

The coffee part is obviously the only thing we have been dreaming of this morning. Sometimes, I am thinking that the next great invention of the civilized world, after the wheel, is likely to be a perfusion with coffee that you can attach to your arm and carry it around all day long…This will solve the issue of taking your coffee in the morning in your kitchen, in the morning at the office, at noon with a client, in the afternoon, before and after lunch, to force an appetite and fight off sleep, at tea time (obviously, instead of tea), early in the evening and somewhere around ten in the evening. Did I mention with a client?. Read my future columns to discover the importance and role of coffee in everyday life.

 

Time's up, so we leave for work. But that will be in my next column.