Morning Glories

But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them.
-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love,
    for in you I trust.
Make me know the way I should go,
    for to you I lift up my soul.
Psalm 143:8

Every weekday morning is the same. I wake up when it gets light or when the upstairs neighbors start moving around. I then roll over and bury my head back in the pillow after glancing at the clock to see how much more sleep I can wring out of the morning.

The alarm goes off at 8 am. I turn it off, knowing it will go off again in 5 minutes. I snuggle deeper in the blankets. After a few more rounds of this, I finally throw the covers back and stumble into the bathroom for a quick shower, the daily baptism into being human for another day. If I was not too tired the night before, I would have laid my clothes out-one less thing to do in the 30 minutes I give myself to get ready and out the door. While I slap on some makeup and use a brief diffuser on my mane, the Husband of the Ages makes a breakfast smoothie of berries, kale, flax, and coconut milk. I’m out the door by 8:47. Ben always walks me to the car and waves me off down the street.

These are my mornings. Made of rituals of squeezing out more rest, delaying the inevitable rise out of delicious cozy sleep and deep blankets. Usually the thought of coffee, “nectar of the gods,” as an old friend called it, is enough to inspire me to thoughts beyond my blankets.

If only every morning included one of these. 

I have never been a morning person. Clearly. I have always enjoyed lounging in bed for hours on weekends, happily drinking coffee or crunching down toast or having an indulgent read in pajamas. All while getting to wake up slowly. Delightful. Life-giving.

The last few years, though, have intensified my lack of enthusiasm for mornings. Along with the usual reluctance, I now face the dreaded aches and pains that fibromyalgia throws at me each morning.

I wake up and take stock of how bad it is
today, curled up and eyes closed still. Mind fogged with sleep, it comes to me in waves of awareness. Damn. Another bad day. The aches pin me down, the deep pains spread through me like branches on a tree. It takes everything in me to move, to throw back those covers, and face the day. When my feet gingerly touch the floor, more aching pains shoot through my feet. Ah. Here we go.

Once I get moving, I can usually keep moving. The hot water, as hot as I can stand it, wakes me up and releases my tight muscles. The concealer under my eyes helps me feel like I don’t look like a cast member of The Walking Dead. Ben’s Wonder Smoothie gets me to have some breakfast when otherwise I would only have coffee.

These routines--simple, yet hard as ice sometimes--prove to me that once again, I can do this. I can do this thing called fibromyalgia. Every day when I get up, knowing my feet will sting and that my body will feel like lead, I am beating it. Every day that I grab my car keys and head to the door, I win. And even on the weekends and evenings when I‘m hard at rest, I am still beating fibromyalgia. I have my evening rituals, too-British murder mysteries, hanging out with friends and family, easy dinners, sometimes a walk around the block or a ride on my stationary bike, working on reading through the top 100 novels list.

All these things help me live life in the middle of figuring out fibroymalgia. Because we all need to find our calms in the storms, eyes in the hurricanes, don’t we? Finding those activities, those routines that make our hearts sing, instilling courage and hope and consistency in the darkest of times, well, that’s when you know the hard things won’t beat you.