Most days don’t feel like anything. This is not a quarantine post. It’s just that most of the days of our lives run like sands through an hour glass and who wants to remember that? Do you know how many times I’ve paid an electric bill in my life? Do you know how many I remember? And why would I?
One of the things I’m trying to do lately with the changes I’m making in my life is to find a way to have more good days, not GREAT days, mind you, just low-key good days. Days that didn’t slip away.
Over the last few years I came to a slow realization about what I like to do on a normal, boring, otherwise forgettable day and I have turned it into a simple little metric. I’m going to tell you what it is and at first you’re going to be all like, “Well that doesn’t sound that hard to pull off!”
But I assure you, it is.
Are you ready?
Here it is: Run. Write. Read.
That’s it!
If you can manage to fit those three things into a normal workaday, normal forgettable, normal day kinda day, then you will have had a good day.
This is when you go, “Well I could do that!”
Oh yeah buddy? Well give it a try!
It is harder than it sounds.
Let’s do the math: I sleep for 8 hours (obviously the first 6 are in the morning and the last 2 are at night), I work 8 hours a day, but (as they keep telling me) I am “required by law” to take at least a half hour lunch, so really my workday allotment of time is actually 8.5 hours end-to-end.
Add those up = 16.5 hours, which leaves me 7.5 in a day in which to live my life.
I get up at 6 and I start work at 8:30, so I have allotted 2.5 hours in the morning. This is for the yoga I haven’t been doing (did some today though), I shower and clean up, I do one of my silly little daily drawings that I post on my artsy Instagram account (@standard_kink), I write a blog post like this one, I listen to a couple of morning news podcasts, I drink coffee. Around 8:15 I drink a meal replacement protein shake and put on my work clothes (Just a t-shirt and a button up. I have worn jeans the entire quarantine. I don’t own sweats).
Okay, so that’s 8 hours of sleep, 8.5 hours of work, 2.5 hours in the morning doing cool stuff, which leaves me precisely 5 hours when I log off work at 5pm. At 5pm I immediately change into running gear and head out the door. (I have to do it this way so that I can draft off the last of my work energy to get me out the door. If I waited until 5:30, I wouldn’t actually go. Plus, the sun sets just after 6pm here right now, so I have to go at 5. Lately I have been running for about an hour. I come back, I shower and clean up, and I start making dinner. Lately I eat pretty much the same thing every night (jasmine rice with sauteed veggies and fish. Throw in some curry powder, some onion powder, soy sauce and black sesame oil … *chef’s kiss*). I watch Youtube while I eat (often the first half of PBS News hour). Then I do the dishes.
By the time all of that is over, it is usually about at or approaching 8pm. Two hours remaining.
From 8 to 9 I have scheduled time to either write or read. Last night I sat down to read and ended up reading until almost 9:30.
BUT! And here is the cool part, because I had written a blog post that morning, I had TECHNICALLY written already (Though considering the writing of a blog post to be “writing” is kind of like in Interview with the Vampire when Tom Cruise in living on rats; it will do the trick, but isn’t really anyone’s preference).
So yesterday was a Run, Write, Read day! I closed the book about 9:30 and still had about a half hour to kill my brain on Twitter.
I plan to have more RWR Days in the future. Those days make me feel like I did something. Like I didn’t just live another day that will forever slip away, like sands through an hourglass.
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