I’m fascinated to discover how many of the books I’ve chosen for my morning reading practice have turned out to be about time. I started with Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time, just finished Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, and have just started Jenny Odell’s Saving Time: Discovering a Live Beyond the Clock.
None of these books is about how to be more productive, which is good because my morning reading is not remotely about efficiency and productivity. It is, even though I’m reading words and writing down some of the ones that strike me as important, a kind of meditative practice.
It started out as a practical thing. I like to do some movement when I first get up – some physical therapy exercises that keep my body moving right along with my Tai Chi form – but I also want to keep an eye on my blood pressure. It’s best to check blood pressure when you’re relaxed, so I started reading for about 15 minutes before I dug out my cuff.
Reading quickly became important in its own right, and over the six months I’ve been doing this, I’ve figured out how to get the most out of it.
First of all, the ideal books are ones best read for a few minutes at a time. Rovelli’s on time was an excellent starting place, since it addressed time as approached by physicists with a philosophical bent and required me to think rather deeply about it when I read.
Books of essays are also good – I read Rebecca Solnit’s latest collection No Straight Road Takes You There before I started on Burkeman. Basically, any book in which reading a few pages gives you something to think about works.
And interestingly, most of the books I’ve ended up really appreciating in this practice are ones I’ve had for some time, but hadn’t read much of, because in truth they are books best read in small doses. If you keep reading to finish the book – as I am prone to do with novels or with nonfiction that’s more reportorial – you miss a lot of the point.
While I’ve been a serious reader all my life – I not only cannot remember not knowing how to read, I do not have any idea how I learned to read except that I already knew how when I started school – I’ve never read this way before.
I might have read school assignments a bit at a time and even taken some notes, but that was for a completely different purpose. In general, I’ve always been the person who buried her nose in a book and kept it there until the end or until interrupted. And I hated being interrupted.
I still read that way, but not first thing in the morning.
And among the things I have learned – especially as I read about time – is that doing this particular bit of reading every day is an incredibly important way to spend my time.
So too is the doing of my morning movement, which while it was also started for the practical purpose of making sure I’m not too achy, has become something that makes me feel incomplete if I skip it.
They’re an addition to the habit I developed not long after I moved to Oakland of walking 10,000 steps a day. (And yes I know that was a marketing ploy for Fitbit, but it is a reasonable number to aim for if you live in a walkable neighborhood and can run your errands on foot, and it’s easier to do a lot of walking if you have a system.)
About the same time I started walking a lot, I began my habit of writing what I now call my “zentao” senryu – haiku-like verses that express what is on my mind each morning. I share those on social media and I even collected a few of them for an anthology, though they’re mostly for myself.
These are the habits that matter to me. These are much more important than some of the chores I keep putting off, such as dealing with financial matters or sorting out belongings so that the house is better organized and other ways of dealing in the world.
One of the nice things about Burkeman’s book in particular is that it made me realize that I’m never going to get everything done anyway and that I might as well spend as much of my time as I can doing what matters to me.
It would probably be good if I can figure out a way to make better daily habits for some other things I really want to do, like finish the novel I’m working on, write some other stuff that’s pounding in my head, and do more drawing.
There are other pressures on my time, of course. I cannot ignore the ongoing destruction of my country and, as my partner often points out, staying healthy takes a lot more work as you get older. Plus the enshittification of tech means you constantly have to stay on top of that to make sure you have the tools you need and are not overwhelmed with their crap.
But the point is to make sure to take time for what matters and deal with the other as best you can.
Early on I wrote in the first notebook I used for making notes from my morning reading that I “woke up with the feeling that I have nothing to look forward to.” This was about a month after the election, which left me in a state of funk because we were faced with addressing problems created by the election instead of the actual problems we already had, like climate change.
The problems we’re faced with haven’t changed – they get wilder by the day – but the reading practice is keeping me from falling into that despair.