Change up

In my ever-changing quest for an early morning routine that starts my day off right, my most recent iteration has involved: up around 645, start coffee, feed cats, meditate, crunches, push ups, then read with coffee. The reading has been "spiritual" in nature, for a long time Al Anon books, then I've moved on to stoics, Jewish thinkers, most recently Buddhists. Not thinking that anybody was going to have the answer, mind you, just looking for daily deposits in the bank of tranquility before I head off into the day.

The blog has been pushed back to later in the morning, after reading the paper and checking email, futures, etc. Which is a delicate place for it to be. Sometimes it happens, sometimes my attention gets sidetracked. In fact, my attention is always at issue. For a while the novelty of meditating was good enough to offer me a bit of a buzz.

For today at least, I'm slipping the blog in early, just to mix things up a bit.

I will grant that the book I am not reading today, Chogyam Trungpa's Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, has a decent point, namely that people are chasing after spiritualism in a materialistic way, looking to conquer tranquility and/or notch up scalps on a path to it. Is that me? Kinda? Maybe?

Still, I have struggled reading the book to fully groove on it. I know in truth that the answer is likely to be that need to strive less, but that is hard to do.