The Little Things That Make a Life Feel Like Yours

My mornings begin on a green sofa.

Depending on the time of year, the sunroom may still be completely dark when I get there. In winter, it usually is. During the warmer months, morning has already started showing up in the backyard outside the windows.

I let Maddie and Opal out, make myself a hot cocoa and curl up on the sofa with a blanket. When the dogs come back inside, they climb up beside me and settle in. And then, for a little while, not much happens. I love that.

There is no television. No music. Usually no conversation. I spend most of my workday talking—calls, Zoom meetings, Teams meetings—so the quiet before anyone starts asking anything of me has become something I protect.

Somewhere in those quiet minutes, I usually take a mindful moment for gratitude. Nothing elaborate or ceremonial. Just a moment to notice something I’m grateful for before the day gets noisy.

And then I scroll social media.

Apparently gratitude and Instagram can coexist.

Across the house, George has his own morning routine. He’s usually in the garage drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and scrolling sports on his laptop.

Very aspirational wellness household we’ve got going here.

Before anybody goes to work.

Eventually, I get off the sofa and the morning changes gears. I shower and get dressed, but apparently I cannot begin working until the house is also prepared for business.

The bed needs to be made. The curtains need to be open. Dishes go into the dishwasher. Anything noticeably out of place gets straightened up. I don’t deep-clean the house every morning—I’m not completely unhinged—but I need things tidy and bright before I can settle into work.

I’ve never created a checklist for this. Nobody taught me to do it, and I don’t stand back afterward and admire my accomplishment. I just know that if I tried to start my workday with an unmade bed, closed curtains and dishes sitting around, those things would continue occupying a tiny corner of my brain until I dealt with them.

So I deal with them, feed the dogs, and we go to work.

My commute is grueling. I walk to another room.

Maddie and Opal come with me because apparently they, too, have full-time jobs. They have bunk beds in my office.

I realize that raises more questions than it answers, but yes: bunk beds. Monday through Friday, I sit at my desk and they settle into their beds as though this is an entirely normal workplace arrangement.

At our house, I suppose it is.

I never thought of any of this as a ritual.

If you’d asked me to describe my rituals, I probably would have started with the things that sound like rituals: yoga, mindfulness, gratitude, maybe something involving nature.

I wouldn’t have said, I make the bed.

And I definitely wouldn’t have said, The dogs clock in and go to their bunk beds.

Most of the things I repeat every day aren’t particularly meaningful while I’m doing them. They’re simply what I do.

The same is true at the other end of the day. I finish work, make dinner and clean up. Sometimes yoga finds its way into the evening; other nights it doesn’t. Eventually George and I watch television and go to bed.

There is, however, one important qualification to the dinner portion of this schedule.

I don’t cook on Mondays or Fridays.

I don’t remember exactly when I instituted this policy, but I’m quite committed to it. Monday and Friday bookend my workweek, and somewhere along the way I decided neither of them should require me to figure out what to cook. We eat leftovers or order something.

Tuesday through Thursday? Fine. I’ll participate in civilization.

Monday? We just started this shit.

Friday? We survived it.

I’m not cooking.

The things we stop deciding.

That’s the part of routines I find interesting. At some point, many of them seem to stop being decisions.

I don’t wake up every morning and evaluate whether today I’d prefer to sit somewhere else with my hot cocoa. I don’t reconsider my position on making the bed. On Friday afternoon, I’m not carefully weighing the relative merits of cooking versus takeout.

We’ve already been over this.

These tiny decisions have been made often enough that they’ve simply become part of the architecture of the day. The dogs know it too. They recognize patterns around meals, work and bedtime with an enthusiasm that suggests they’re running a much tighter operation than I am.

There’s science behind some of this. Repeated behaviors can become associated with particular contexts and increasingly automatic over time, which is part of what researchers study when they look at habits. Rituals are somewhat different: repeated actions can also acquire meaning or significance beyond whatever practical function they serve.

But I’m reluctant to get too precious about the distinction. I’m not sure putting my dishes in the dishwasher needs to be elevated to ritual status. They’re dirty dishes. They need to go somewhere.

What interests me more is what happens when all of these completely unremarkable repetitions accumulate.

This is apparently what my life looks like.

There are the obvious markers we use to describe our lives: where we live, what we do for work, who we love, the important things that have happened to us. But very little of an ordinary Tuesday is made up of those headline events.

An ordinary Tuesday is dogs going outside. Hot cocoa. A blanket. A phone. Gratitude. Curtains being opened. A bed being made. Two absurdly spoiled Yorkies reporting to an office with bunk beds. Calls. Dinner. Dishes. Maybe yoga. Television with George.

None of it would make a particularly compelling annual holiday letter.

But put together, it’s recognizably my life.

I think that’s why routines can become more visible when they’re interrupted. Travel does it. A change in schedule does it. Sometimes something as simple as an appointment at the wrong time throws off the whole rhythm of a morning.

And sometimes the disruption is a little more dramatic.

Say, hypothetically, you walk downstairs and water squishes up through your basement floor, you have two dogs who need to get to a vet thirty minutes away, one vomits in the car and the other poops in the pet store.

Hypothetically.

On those mornings, you become acutely aware that this is not how things usually go.

Most mornings are boring by comparison.

Thank God.

Maybe ordinary is allowed to be ordinary.

I think we sometimes put unnecessary pressure on the practices that are supposed to help us live well. A morning routine should prepare us for optimal performance. An evening routine should improve our sleep. A mindfulness practice should make us more present. Yoga should make us stronger or calmer. Gratitude should improve our outlook.

There can be real value behind those practices. I wouldn’t keep returning to some of them if I didn’t believe that.

But I don’t want every ordinary thing I do to have a job.

My hot cocoa doesn’t need to optimize anything. Sometimes yoga happens because I want to practice yoga. Sometimes I watch television because I want to watch television. I make the bed because I like the bed made. I open the curtains because I like my house bright.

And I sit on the green sofa because I fucking love that sofa.

There isn’t a lesson hiding inside every one of those choices. There doesn’t need to be.

Maybe that’s part of what makes a life feel like ours. We repeat certain things not because they’re profound or productive, but because somewhere along the way we’ve decided—consciously or otherwise—this is how I like to live.

Tomorrow morning, I’ll probably do most of it again. I’ll let the dogs out and make my hot cocoa. I’ll curl up on the green sofa while Maddie and Opal settle into the blanket beside me. George will be somewhere across the house with his coffee, cigarettes and sports. I’ll take a moment for gratitude and probably spend considerably more than a moment scrolling my phone.

Eventually, I’ll get up. I’ll make the bed, open the curtains, put away whatever needs putting away and let the light into the house. The dogs and I will go to work, people will start appearing on my screen, and the quiet will be over.

Nothing profound will have happened.

It will just be morning.

My morning.

And maybe that’s enough.