Daryl Wood's Blog

On the days when I feel confused, sad, anxious, uncertain, I lean into my routine. My wellness coach encouraged me to stack habits to help create a system/routine. I had been doing that in a scattered way but decided to make it consistent. So this morning when I woke up from a restless night and feeling discouraged, I followed my routine. Boil the kettle, Vitamin D drops, frozen blueberries in a bowl, prepare the wedge of lemon, heat the eye pad, put in the eye drops, etc. In the middle of this, the eye pad has to rest on my eyes for five minutes. Five whole minutes sitting in a recliner waiting for the timer to say done. This is one of the little pauses in my day that give me a chance to soften my body from the inevitable tension of being up and about.

Nothing glamorous or exciting about this routine but I have had a couple of occasions when I didn’t follow the pattern and left something out or changed the order. The result added more discomfort and had me backtracking to balance things. Being retired and being a widow now makes routine the way it was in the past almost unnecessary. Except that it feels so vital to my sanity, to my wellbeing as I start each day. And there are lots of little routines throughout the day as well but none as significant as the morning.

I’ve always loved scheduling and planning and have routines. What I know now is that all those years of being ‘on task’ laid the groundwork for how well I could function and achieve what mattered to me. In my women’s retreats there were agendas. Of course having three wide eyed, vulnerable women to care for meant continuously adjusting and accommodating. And it was the routine, the system that held things in place.

In any stressful situation it is our default thinking and acting that will help us through. When we have routines that resonant with our beliefs and our character we can more easily slip into the power of follow through. And for me, on days that feel wonky, routine and follow through gets me out of the weeds and into the sunshine. Even on a cloudy day.