Read an Excerpt
My friend Alice seems to have arrived at the threshold of living one day at a time. It’s calming to be in her unhurried, gentle presence. She used to be as manic and driven as anyone I knew. But not now. Something’s different. She says it has to do with the way she begins her day. Her morning ritual. “I’ve got the first hour going pretty well; maybe the rest of the day will follow in time.”
As is often the case, good news is not very dramatic. No sudden violence or crisis shaped what Alice does each day—she lived her way into it little by little. I share her story because it has health and sanity in it. In looking at rituals, I’ve tried to stay away from the illness models of life—away from what’s wrong—and have sought the company and testimony of people whose lives seem to be working well. We’re all too familiar with toxic habit patterns. Better to consider healthy models. It’s like shifting from a focus on divorced couples to studying successful marriages. Everybody knows what can go wrong. My question is, “What can go right?”
Alice has an answer.
I’ll deliberately leave what she looks like to your imagination. You’ll get enough information about her as we go along to bring her to life in your mind. You know someone like her already—you may even be someone like her.
One spring the women in Alice’s office were passing around self-improvement books. About dieting, exercise, and spirituality. Creating a “you-could-do-better” atmosphere. Alice thought “could-do-better” was as often a curse as an encouragement. She thumbed through the books out of courtesy, not personal interest.
Though she couldn’t remember exactly when the line was crossed from the restless discontent of her thirties to her present state of mind, she was, in her forties, reasonably content with her life. Maybe someday she would get back to “could-do-better,” but she was now in a “this-will-do” phase of her life, and she found it unexpectedly satisfying.
Though she was not as thin, attractive, smart, healthy, or happy as she might have been, she was thin enough, attractive enough, smart enough, healthy enough, and happy enough. An outsider might see room for improvement, and some expert might show her ways in which further ambition might pay off in the long run. And she supposed that the urge for change would rise up again out of unforeseen circumstances. Still, it pleased her to realize for the time being it was a just being time. Life was fine, especially when she considered it one day at a time, and one morning at a time.
–
This understanding came to her one afternoon, riding the bus home from work. As she fell into that meditative trance-state bus travel induces, she thought about her life and realized her daily routine was composed of habits so carefully observed she might call them sacred—because she honored them as surely as if she had joined a religious order. They had become that important to her.
Some might think she was lonely—her son was away at college, her daughter working in Portland, and her husband, a field geologist, was gone a good deal of the time. She wasn’t lonely, though. She realized she was accepting, even welcoming, of the unplanned solitude—especially the solitude after daybreak each day. This regular, reliable morning stillness had become a cherished part of her life.
She had often wondered exactly why the Lord’s Prayer had the line in it “Give us this day, our daily bread.” Now, on these mornings in the middle years of her life, she thought she had it figured out. Perhaps it meant, “Let this day suffice—let it be.”
–
Just before six A.M., she began waking—floating up out of the night world—aware that somehow her mind was alert, though her eyes were not open and her body wasn’t moving. Though she hadn’t needed an alarm clock in several years, she often set the timer in the stereo in the living room to play music at six. When the music began, she began to rise. Without conscious effort or intention, her eyes would open, and she would roll over, sit on the edge of the bed, and stand in one easy motion.
“Good morning, Alice,” she greeted herself.
Determined not to begin the morning with a sense of urgency, she stretched and yawned and stood still, looking out the window. She didn’t turn on the lights right away—the artificial light was too jarring—so she was content moving about in the soft half-light of daybreak, or else, in winter, with candlelight, putting on this new day as comfortably as she put on her robe.
Her robes were seasonal. She hadn’t exactly planned it that way, but that’s how it evolved. In winter there was a long, warm deep purple terry-cloth robe her mother gave her for Christmas. It was beginning to fade, but she liked the connection with her mother and her childhood. The robe, like her relationship with her mother, had softened with age.
In spring she changed to a new blue-and-white cotton kimono given to her by a Japanese exchange student she had befriended. It made her think of faraway places where she had never been.
In summer there was a white chenille bathrobe with a pattern on it that reminded her of the spread on her grandmother’s bed. She found it at a neighborhood garage sale. Instant nostalgia. And she was childishly amused by the patterns it left on her skin when she lay down on the couch in it. It was the closest she would come to having tattoos.
And in the fall she wore a cotton robe her husband had brought her as a surprise gift from a business trip somewhere. Printed with flowers—mostly orange and yellow and red—like the colors of leaves in autumn. She wore this robe at other times, as well—when he was away and she missed him, and when he came home—to please him.
These robes were not part of some conscious fashion scheme—not purchased by her or acquired all at once. They had accumulated and been made important by use and association. She changed robes by some unconscious prompting from weather and daylight. They were useful, practical garments, but when she thought about it, she realized she wore them as much for the feelings and memories they evoked as for their physical comfort. When I told her I thought her robes had become like temple garments, she smiled and replied, “Yes.”
The habits of her morning had acquired value in the same way as the robes. Only when she began taking notice of her morning routines did she realize how important these habits had become—how they were rituals of rightness and not just routine. The word “sacred” could be honestly applied. What had changed about her life was her becoming mindful of what already existed.
Going into the bathroom was always the first act of the new day. The toilet first, then the basin, where she washed her face, brushed her teeth, combed her hair—all the while considering herself in the mirror. Every day of her life she met herself in the mirror.
She had a habit of closing her eyes while she brushed her teeth—though she didn’t know why—and it amused her. Even when she thought, I’m not going to close my eyes this time, she always did. She often thought about her “pilots”—the automatic one and the conscious one, and this teeth-brushing thing was like a contest between them. When she closed her eyes, she saw herself in her mind’s mirror as a dutiful child, doing the right thing. The routine of brushing her teeth had become a habit associated with virtue. Teeth-brushing and rightness were intertwined.
–
After the bathroom came the kitchen—flipping the switch to the coffee grinder and turning the fire on under the kettle on the stove. Nothing said “Good morning!” better than the smell of coffee. Then a glass of juice from the refrigerator. It seemed as if someone else had prepared this welcome to her in the kitchen each morning: the person she was yesterday. She liked having these things ready to go the night before. There was a certain comforting quality about it—it meant her life was in order.
From the kitchen, she moved out through the living room to open the front door, consider the day, check the weather and the season. She thought of this as getting the early-morning news of the world. Rain, sun, spring, snow—wind or calm—there was always this local news to consider.
Picking up the paper from the front steps, she unwrapped it as she walked back through the house into the kitchen to brew the coffee. She had mixed feelings about reading the newspaper. So much of its contents dealt with death and disease and crime and violence everywhere in the world. She cared—cared to the point of despair sometimes—but it was hard to begin the day with this news. Sometimes she put the front section of the paper away to face in the evening and turned to the less disturbing parts.
She always looked at the “Peanuts” cartoon strip and the weather map.
And she usually checked her horoscope. Not that she really believed in astrology, but she was fascinated by the writer’s skill in making such clever predictions that could be interpreted to fit so many individual situations. She realized that she was doing what people had been doing for thousands of years—consulting oracles, throwing the bones, checking with the fates.
And then there were those days when her horoscope was absolutely right-on. That amazed and baffled her—gave her one more connection with the many mysteries she recognized as part of being alive. The mysteries didn’t diminish with age—the older she got, the more mystery she encountered. Someday there would be nothing left but mystery. By mystery she also meant those things she understood but could not speak of for lack of adequate words. Maybe death was like that—the place where mystery and understanding finally became one.
Some days she ignored the paper altogether. And she never turned on the television in the morning. Mornings were best when she was alone in her mind and had no interference with her mood and thinking. Often she took her coffee into the living room and sat in a chair by the window, listening to music, looking out at the day and the world. She supposed this was what people meant by meditation. Perhaps it was her form of morning prayer.
