The Way to Start a Day

I rise this morning with the sun. Athena, the much-loved-puppo, stays in bed for awhile and then joins me in the office.

I warm my hands with a mug of hot lemon water, my low back with a heating pad. Such luxuries. Soon, though, hot drinks easily made and electricity at my fingertips will seem common. I may take them for granted. Or maybe not.

Experiments help to keep gratitude alive, to keep life flowing. Is this statement true? If so, how true? If so, for whom? The experimenter? The listener of the experimenter’s story?

In October 2020 I began a grand (as I defined it) experiment- to wake up before the sunrise, walk to one of a few nearby bluffs and to watch the sun rise.

I liked and did not like my experiment. I found it meaningful and not-at-all-worthy. I experienced joy and misery. Eventually, my likes and dislikes, my need for meaning, fell away. I went to watch the sun rise and I felt still. Stillness, as if the sun and me and the wind and the trees and the birds were all witnessing the beginning of a day for this part of the world together.

Soon after the year was up, (and some summer days when sun rise happened before 5 a.m.) I stopped the daily attending to the sun rise and moved on to Other Ways to Start a Day. I have experimented with various coffee rituals, reading poetry, writing morning pages (a practice inspired by Julia Cameron), meditating, greeting the morning through a listing of beings I love, followed by the heartfelt phrase, Good Morning.

My experiments have often been motivated by a desire to “get something correct”, to understand something, to inspire myself towards more deeply felt experiences, to improve my writing. The more experiments I do, the more I find myself delighted by noticing the changes between one attempt and the next.

Today, I read a short story by Haruki Murakami- Cream, from his collection First Person Singular translated from Japanese by Philip Gabriel. In this, the first story of the collection, a narrator describes an experience as an 18 year old– when he encountered an old man in an unfamiliar park under an unfamiliar arbor. (A liminal space?)

The old man says, “In French, they have an expression: creme de la creme. Do you know it?”

The cream, he explains, is the best of the best. “The most important essence of life– that’s the creme de la creme. Get it? The rest is just boring and worthless.”

I wonder if experiments, observing and testing the experiences of being alive, show me the cream of life? Produce the cream of life?

Ponderings today:

• Do experiments, grand or small, frame a piece of experience?

• Are experiments defined by noticing and documenting?

• What experiments are also acts of creation?

• Does one person’s experiment inspire another’s?

• What is the etymology of the word experiment?

  • experiment (n.)

    mid-14c., "action of observing or testing; an observation, test, or trial;" also "piece of evidence or empirical proof; feat of magic or sorcery," from Old French esperment "practical knowledge, cunning; enchantment, magic spell; trial, proof, example; lesson, sign, indication

• What is the etymology of the word experience?

  • late 14c., "observation as the source of knowledge; actual observation; an event which has affected one," from Old French esperience "experiment, proof, experience" (13c.), from Latin experientia "a trial, proof, experiment; knowledge gained by repeated trials,"

This is the way I started a day (September 15, 2022): warmed inside and out, reading a short story, walking under the sun mid-morning at the park with Athena, listening to the trees, watching the pickle-ball players, grounding my feet into the earth, finding a centre, letting go of thoughts and expectations, returning home to write- about what or for whom I did not know.

Resources I’ve found useful:

Extraordinary Routines is labour of love by writer Madeleine Dore exploring how people cope with the ebb and flow of daily life.

The Way to Start A Day, picture book by Byrd Baylor. Some people say there is a new sun every day, and that it begins its life at dawn and lives for one day only. They say you have to welcome it.

From cavemen, to the Aztecs, to the ancient Egyptians, Baylor Bird describes the ways that people throughout history and the world celebrated the dawn. By the end you may be inspired to create your own song for the sunrise.