Happiness without the hangover.

on harvesting magic from the mundane

I’m trying this new thing where I take exquisite care of myself.

That is to say, I want to.

I aspire to be the girl that wears perfume to bed and syncs her workouts with her menstrual cycle…

Honestly though I feel like I’m still working on eating a green thing every day and moving my body without shaming it first.

…but “exquisite” is where I’m aiming for.

Anyways, it was a couple Tuesday’s ago that this whole thing was set in motion for me.

I had left my window open the night before and woke up to the smell of rain filling my bedroom. My sheets silky and warm against my body protected me from the crisp air, and a slow pitter patter fell melodically on my window sill.

As my body yawned awake I noticed the first thoughts of the day beginning to formulate. The first, a familiar and expected jolt to my system encouraging me to launch out of bed and onto my yoga mat…and almost simultaneously, a surprising second thought: what if I just…didn’t?

The dichotomy of my thoughts froze me in place…never before had I given myself the option to consider staying exactly where I was. Never before had I broken my own rules and lingered in bed for hours enjoying the rain.

But the melancholy of the morning had given me pause…enough pause, I suppose, that a buried voice had found the courage to slip to the surface and offer me a softer option…one that asked me to be fully here, now. One that invited me to be present with both the dreamy aesthetic of the morning…and also with the turbulence that not moving was creating in me.

I wish I could tell you that it was easy for me, on a morning where I had nothing I had to do and nowhere I had to be, to move slowly and take the space that this joy-starved part of me was yearning for. 

I wish I could tell you that I “took the seat of the observer” and allowed the waves of anxious energy to flow through me without judgment of my experience.

But I can’t. 

I was in chaos, at war with myself around the threat of missing my allotted workout time.

But this morning, for some reason, the part of me that reveals herself only in shy glimpses during particularly magical moments, like when I witness the sun first peeking up over the horizon…when a leaf crunches beneath my foot…or a Frank Sinatra song comes on the radio…

…the part of me that patiently waits to be tossed scraps of joy and presence…

…she wasn’t whispering a gentle request in my ear. She was pleading with me to please, just this once, stay here a little longer…satiate me a little more.

And so, I did. I leaned in. I did the thing I actually wanted to do instead of the thing I thought I should be doing.

I made myself a cup of coffee, climbed back into bed, grabbed my Kindle and fell blissfully into a fiction book…where I lingered for the next 2 hours…

…the whole duration of which my body pulsed with anxious energy, crippled under the loss of control and predictability in my day…and confused why I would toss that to the side in order to stretch out an ordinary moment. 

But that's what our life is composed of most, isn’t it? Ordinary moments all stacked together like a sketchy Jenga tower, where every choice we make is a piece we must play. More often than not, I’d say, we poke about to find the piece that’s easy, wiggly, obvious…

…the most controlled and predictable path to getting your piece to the top of the tower.

But every so often we take notice of one that's not easy or obvious, inconspicuously taunting us, daring us to try...but threatens to topple the whole thing over at the slightest tremor or shred of doubt.

And so, I think this morning felt magical not because it offered me a peak experience that rocket-launched me into the joy of the present moment and left me emotionally hungover after. 

But rather because it was actually something so simple that was made special only because I noticed it there, available for me to take a risk, turn towards it and try. 

And so, my working theory is that perhaps every ordinary moment holds within it something that makes it sacred, and we have the endless capacity to choose to see it and savor it if we want.

I know for me, at least, I cannot unsee that starved part of me. I cannot continue on scraps of random joy alone. And I also cannot fully satiate myself only on the moments that put life on pause so I can drink the sweet elixir of rest and play…the moments that come to us all at once with joy and presence bubbling over in excess…but only for a short time and only under very specific conditions and circumstances.

No, I want to learn how to access magic in the daily mundane.

I want to slow down enough in my life to actually notice myself living it…to be with the unfolding of it…and to take pause shamelessly when I feel that little voice in me start to glow.

I want the time I spend nourishing myself to be more than just taking my vitamins or drinking enough water…I want to stop arbitrarily checking self care boxes and tallying up how well I loved myself each day. 

And I want to just love myself without anything propping that love up.

I want lush.

I want to stop saving my “good” plates for special occasions and enjoy them as a canvas for my scrambled eggs and toast.

I want to dig out my “nice” guest towels and let them go dingy from the hundreds of times they brought me a moment of “ah” as I step out of the steamy shower and wrap them around me.

I want to scribble random thoughts and meaningless doodles in my expensive notebooks and stop saving them for only poetic and meaningful entries.

I want to actually use my bougie candles…I want to wear lingerie under my baggy t-shirt…I want to stop and stand in the middle of a busy sidewalk and close my eyes without apology simply because I want the sun to linger on my face a little longer.

I want time with myself on my yoga mat to be the goal, not some shape or advanced posture…I want to actually feel my body and enjoy its rhythm…instead of simply manipulating it to perform.

I want to take exquisite care of myself…which starts, I imagine, by actually being with myself and noticing as often as I can when a moment can be made special simply because I am there, in it. 

Like, really in it.

At least that’s where I’m choosing to start.

That’s what I want to practice.

x laura