I’m not a person who craves adventure.  In fact, if anything, I crave order and routine.  That’s not to say I don’t have my “zany” moments, but we’re talking craving here!  So settling into a pattern is something that I would expect to find comfortable.

Okay, so here I am on October 25, 2007.  Game 2 of the World Series will be starting in a little more than an hour.  I’ll be up late, and then will wake up early tomorrow and set about navigating my way through a groggy Friday along with much of the rest of the baseball-watching world. 

It’s the waking up part that I want to talk about.  For the past couple of months I’ve had an odd feeling most mornings.  Bear with me here …

I wake up.  Okay – it’s a little more circuitous than that.  I hear my alarm, hit the snooze button, hear the alarm again, hit the snooze button again … you get it.  Eventually necessity dictates that I turn the alarm off and get up. 

I step into my Birkenstocks in the half-light, walk across the room and turn on my floor lamp … switch on the computer … head to the bathroom to brush my teeth … then walk  down the stairs,  gathering dogs and cats as I go. 

One dog (Willie) is often in my room.  He stretches, he yawns, and he waits.  He never starts down the stairs until I’m ready and right behind him. (And yes, he ALWAYS goes first).  The second dog (Ruby) comes out of the room she sleeps in on the second floor, and stretches and yawns before heading downstairs – right behind Willie but always in front of me.

So pretty much every day this is what happens.  And every day I have this strong morning feeling of déjà vu.  The dance is so routinized!  Meanwhile the two cats are just milling around and are much more random in their behavior.  Sometimes they appear sometimes not.  The dogs are like clockwork, though – and so am I.

We get downstairs and I let Willie and Ruby out to pee while I move quickly to the kitchen to get their breakfasts.  I put their food down and go quickly back to the door where they are waiting, barely able to contain themselves.  Willie always pushes his head against the door as I swing it open, and they race in.  This is one of the truly BIG moments of their day!  They inhale their breakfasts, and then lie down and, presumably, doze off.  Or maybe they read the paper … I don’t know, because I get my coffee and go back to my computer to find out what’s happened in the world during the night.

The past couple of months there’s been a sameness to this morning time that has felt unsettling to me, rather than comfortably familiar.  I sometimes find myself laughing as I and the dogs do EXACTLY the same things in the same order every morning.  Sometimes the thought crosses my mind that like Bill Murray in “Ground Hog Day” I’m traipsing toward the same day over and over and over.

I’m puzzled at the quality of my feeling about this morning time.  Pondering it, my first guess is that I’ve fallen into a routine that I haven’t fully owned in some way.  It’s not really mine but something that carries me forward – so it can feel like a treadmill rather than a path. 

I’m learning that it takes mindfulness and discipline to keep my routine alive … and to keep myself authentically connected to it.  So if I can own my early morning choices differently, maybe the routine doesn’t need to feel rote.  Choosing more consciously … maybe just pausing to breathe and let myself feel where I am … I can create familiar yet mindful ways to begin each brand spanking new day!