They’re back! My kids just got home from summer camp. We’ve been doing their laundry and sorting through their clothes to get ready for the upcoming school year. A week ago, I was getting ready for the kids to come home. They’ve been gone at sleepaway camp all summer. They love it. They have this time away without electronics, they have adventures, they grow in their identities, and they get to just BE with other kids. And at that same time, David and I get some time alone together. 

As I was getting ready for the kids to get back, I realized that I hadn’t settled into my best well-oiled routine while they were gone. I thought for sure that after 8 weeks I would have a great routine humming along. But I didn’t, and I had a little crisis about it. I wasn’t doing my morning routine the way I feel best. There is a Yiddish saying I love, which is: “Lose an hour in the morning, chase it all day.” 

That’s the state I was in. I wasn’t fully doing my meditation each day. Sometimes I was just having quiet time in bed instead of meditation, and I’d often just end up falling back asleep. And I wasn’t doing my Egoscue exercises regularly every morning either. There are “floors” and “ceilings” when it comes to habit stacks—floors are the bare minimum and ceilings are the whole, full routine. Really there was no reason for this, except that I wasn’t getting enough sleep. 

So, I took inventory. And I realized the issue was that I wasn’t getting to bed on time. So when the morning would roll around, I was still tired. And I realized that there was a part of me that was reveling in having evenings either alone with David or by myself, and I was getting caught up in doing things and I was going to bed too late. I realized that I need the task-master manager part of me to get on my case again to get to bed early. 

Getting to bed early is usually, for me, the linchpin behavior that makes everything else work. If I get to bed early, I get enough sleep. Then I can nail my morning routine. And that launches me into my day feeling on-top-of-it, happy, alive, thriving, productive--as opposed to feeling behind, scrambling, chasing that lost hour all day. 

So I started getting to bed on time the last few days and have nailed my morning routine. I feel amazing. Wow. It really is the linchpin.