Morning Routine

The ancient wish to be a cat.

New morning routine. Five minutes pressing my head against Morti’s purrs.

Stare at the way the light creeps through the house.

Rub the waxy leaves of the pothos.

Scribble in a journal.

I didn’t work out by 7:30 even though I’ve written the command in ink.

Work out by 7:30.

I didn’t write the the next great American novel before lunch.

But what even is lunch?

Go to the store. Get a vegetable. Chop a vegetable. Chop all the vegetables. Chop them and put them in containers to throw into a salad or a soup when we’re crunched for time. No. Stop.

Time is not ours to wrangle.

No.

No.

The vegetables are for giving you life. They are bringing you into the moment. Not a time hack or biohack. Be here now. Don’t cut your finger.

You think of everything wrong. You’re not a robot. You’re a fleshy-flesh lady. The vegetable is the thing that’s been growing from the earth. The sun was the thing that pulled it to the surface.

Imagine the seed gets stuck in its morning pages.

You remember the earth is wet this morning. It’s the perfect time to pull weeds. Get out there and get them before the dirt hardens around the roots and locks them in. Hurry before this all dries up.

No.

There is no time. Time cannot be structured and planned. It will get away from you. You always let it get away. But you can’t stop it. Already. If you want to pour your coffee and go back to bed, now is the time for that. It’s early enough. But Mel says that’s procrastinating. That’s not allowed to be the morning routine.

But the morning routine can be whatever you want it to be.

No.

Just start with the head against the cat. Just rub her cheek to turn on vibrating mode. It’s supposed to heal broken things. Something about the resonance.

How many people do you become? An amalgamation of the five people you spend the most time with? Does that mean you’re at least three-fifths cat and can relax?

We don’t produce anything but fur and whiskers.

We stare at each-other for an amount of time that would be uncomfortable for humans, but we are mostly cats.

What can we say is produced in that time?

Nothing.

Is staring at a cat like staring at a candle? Like staring at an ancient wish to nap all day while it’s everyone else’s job to be productive? I should have been born the queen of the jungle so I could dangle from a tree and strike fear in my prey. I’d nap and wake to the fact that my only quota is hunger.

What if every moment counts? What if I spend every moment thinking about the moment and how to make it count? What if all I do is count the moments I wasted counting moments that didn’t count, or that I didn’t want to count or don’t count up to much of anything?

What if I say to myself, I say once you get out of bed your day is shot. You’re just getting through all the standing things you must do before you can get back the laying down things. You want to be the cat?

Stay in bed. Don’t seize the day. Just this once.

Just this one morning routine.