Over the years I’ve received numerous requests to do a day-in-my-life walk-through and I’ve finally gotten around to doing it, in blog form. =) This will be a typical weekday in my life. At some point in the near future I’ll post a sequel: a weekend in my life.
I wake up before sunrise, and so what you see above is what I typically see when I head downstairs to the kitchen to make myself a pot of coffee, especially through the winter months.
As I walk down the stairs and while the coffee brews, I’m mapping out my morning. What needs to get done in the next three to four hours? Where did I leave off on each of those projects I’m about to dive in to?
My breakfast this morning is sauteed bitter melon (just a little bit of animal fat, no seasoning) and fresh blueberries. I don’t eat this for yummy reasons. I eat this for medicine reasons. While I’m prepping, I’m checking work e-mails, drafting and scheduling blog posts, outlining talking points for videos, or if I’m in the middle of writing a book at that time, then my laptop is open on the kitchen table and I’m writing while I’m cooking.
To be clear, modern medicine wins over homeopathic, folksy, holistic anecdotal home remedies every time for me, and if I get diagnosed with something, I’m going to go with the prescription pills. But on the regular, in terms of preventative care, I’m a huge proponent for considering the medical and health benefits of food. I very much follow Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) for my diet and cooking. So almost everything I eat has a TCM purpose to it. Herbology isn’t just having shelves full of pretty glass jars filled with exotic herbs. It’s something I implement into daily cooking.
I’m not going to say something like breakfast is the most important meal or that it’s even necessary. I don’t think it’s necessary for most people, given their 21st century lifestyles. However, in agrarian cultures, you *had* to eat breakfast, because immediately after, you’d be working out on the fields until sundown! That’s my ancestry and DNA, and so I find that for me, even though I’m not working out on a literal field, what I do is a modern and mental equivalent. Breakfast powers the operations of my mind and keeps me going in an optimized and productive manner.
Most mornings, I get to watch the sunrise. My home office window looks out directly east (something intentional, which I looked for when house hunting), so I can sip my coffee, do stretches, a morning meditation, or a morning ritual facing eastward and actually get to catch a glimpse of the rising sun.
This is important to me. Watching the sunrise conveys a rather remarkable and paradoxical feeling where, simultaneously, you feel both incredibly honored and important and yet also, equally, incredibly small and insignificant. I think that’s quite the compelling thought at the start of every day of your life.
benebell wen 