Every day comes with its own challenges and celebrations. Usually I wake up feeling ‘behind’ as if I already need to work extra hard to catch up. On days like that, waking up often starts me off with a feeling of dread or overwhelm.

If someone were to ask me how I feel when I wake up, I would in all honesty say that I feel happy and blessed with the arrival of every new day. In theory, that’s always true. I know that I am fortunate to have another day and that my day is highly unlikely to require me to haul drinking water from a village well, or cope with snipers after a curfew, or wonder how far I can stretch some rice to feed my family.

Already, in the blessing of having been born in Canada in a middle class family and in a safe neighborhood, I’ve won the proverbial lottery. If you’re connected to the internet and have enough ‘free’ time to read this post, you’ve probably won the same lottery too.

I guess, before anything else clutters our mind, we should start by remembering that. Thinking with a global mindset usually defuses a lot of the otherwise upsetting challenges we are facing. It shakes some common sense into us about the fret over a cluttered room or the preoccupation over the ins and outs of daily chores and work/family balance and the number on our bathroom scale.

I watched a person on YouTube who has created a pretty successful brand for herself online. The work she does in that forum keeps her very busy and sometimes stressed. She popped into my mind as I was writing this post because she went to Africa about 6 or 8 months ago on a mission to empower girls and women. I think she went to Kenya. I am thinking about this because for a time after that trip, her mindset was profoundly changed. She took more time to consider the things that she let stress her out and when she would raise an issue, she immediately reminded herself of the far more oppressive problems facing the people she had met on her trip, she would say “first world problem” as a way of chastising herself and reminding us all of how blessed we are.

I really enjoyed seeing that transformation. In the months after my stroke while I was living in a couple of hospitals, my mind had a new way of seeing the world. I realized that there were thousands of people like me, in the hospital. I also realized that the things that used to preoccupy me really weren’t the things that matter the most in life. It doesn’t matter if I managed to repaint my front door as much as I might let it dominate my thoughts. It doesn’t matter if I managed to see a friend for a coffee this week or not because the true friends won’t use it against me and we will be able to pick up where we left off without any worry about drama.

Anything that can’t survive real life doesn’t deserve to be part of my life anyway. A friendship that takes a ton of effort to maintain and hold drama at bay is not a friendship worth the investment. A circle of friends who make you feel ashamed of having them over for a meeting or coffee because you’ve fallen behind on some housework are not the people you need to surround yourself with. And the chores that keep getting postponed to the next day because more important things take up your time don’t merit the self-imposed berating that you punish yourself with.

Our perspective gets screwed up when we already have the basics of what we need. If we are not starving and are not afraid for our safety it gives us time to make up new “emergencies” that are really not important at all.

I think it’s useful, now and then, to check what’s eating at us and look at how important it is in the grand scheme of things.

I use a bullet journal method of organizing myself which allows me to keep running lists of things I need to take care of or whatever pops into my mind. It’s amazing how granular my preoccupations can become. I can get so picky and so deep into the weeds of life that I forget that the important thing in life is to just keep swimming (as Dory would say).

I woke up today at 5 am and I took the early morning minutes to first start off by saying thank you to God for the opportunity of this day. I then decided to focus on the fact that today is going to be a good day. I decided that I really wanted to get my Monday blog post done and then I might tackle a few more list tasks but that today would be a good day whether I got one or twenty jobs done.

With that mental conversation, my approach to the day totally changed into a victory even from the start line. It made me realize how much “failure” or “success” happens between our ears and it also made me realize the power of how you start your day. Mornings are powerful… even if your morning starts after noon. Take hold of the first few minutes of your day and wrap your arms around them and give them a big kiss. Treat the morning the way you want the day to treat you – with joy and happiness and optimism. Win the race even before your first step.

Be well,

Jen