These Two Epiphanies can Potentially Change Lives!

These can change my life as well, provided I am able to follow my own advise.

On one Monday morning, I woke up exactly at 4.45 AM.

Then I ran for ~30 mins and noticed I completed 5 KM with an average heart rate of 135. “Perfect!” I said to myself. After I got back home, I took a nice hot shower, brewed my perfect BLV Fine blend filter coffee, and also completed my morning prayer rituals (which I must admit I don’t get done on most days!)

After about half an hour of reading (for inspiration), I got down to writing. No sooner than I started to write, my fingers moved magically over the keyboard, and words flew from my mind and onto the screen. After about an hour, I had produced my best blog post, yet. And I said, “Perfect”.

All this was done by about 8 am, by which time my wife was also done with her Yoga. Just then, my 6-year-old son also got up and we hugged each other a good morning! He quickly got ready (without either of his parent’s help!), and we enjoyed a nice breakfast together before I logged him in on his online school (Covid times!) at 9 AM sharp.

Then I logged in myself (wfh), to catch up with my office work. By noon, with three 40-minute deep-work sessions, I completed all three of my biggest tasks for the day. No emergencies at work, no firefighting, and no phone calls or pings to disturb my focus. A “perfect” start to the work-day.

The three of us then had a quality meal together, post which my son did his homework (by himself), and then played with his new Lego set by which time my wife and I called it a day and logged off from work at 6 pm.

In the evening, we had a lot of fun playing cricket, and after the evening aarti, my wife cooked her signature “Masoor Pulao”, which we enjoyed for dinner.

After brushing his teeth, I read a few stories to my son, and put him to bed by 10 pm. I meditated for some time; and went to bed myself.

“What A Perfect Day”, I thought, and smiled.

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The smile soon faded, when I woke up, and realized that it was “STILL” a Monday. A Monday morning!! Damn.. I was only ‘dreaming’ about a Perfect Day! And here I was on an actual Monday, with the clock screaming 8 AM as I got up. Crap… I had not only overslept, but also ruined my chance to start my day with a dose of productivity.

The rest of the day was no better. I was only playing catch up. Right from rushing my son for his online school, to trying to douse fires at work. Eventually, work time spilled well into late evening. During the day, there was some (or a lot?) shouting and screaming, and we ultimately found no time for prayers/ aarti, no time for cricket, and no time for bedtime stories (we mindlessly watched TV instead – brain fog!) Finally, when we went to bed, it was around midnight. I was too tired to even meditate!

“What an imperfect day”, I thought, and sighed!

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However, despite being tired, my restless mind did not allow me to sleep. I kept tossing and turning, trying to reflect on how I spend my time. Will my ‘Perfect Day’ ever fructify? What was going wrong? Why do I sleep every night with the intention to have a ‘perfect’ next day, to no avail?

Seeing the day slip by without achieving much made me irritable. Although I was getting some things done here and there, what I lacked was consistency to make any difference. I meditated for a day, and then missed meditating for many days. Ditto for all other goals. It was as if the 24 hours in a day were not enough. That “Perfect Day” simply was elusive.

Since I was not getting any sleep that night, I started to break down my day. There was nothing I could do to about 16 hours in the workday (8 hours for sleep were non-negotiable. So were the 8 hours of my day job). That left me with about 8 hours for (a) self-development (to work on my body, mind & soul); (b) relationships (family and friends); (c) errands and daily chores (eating, getting ready, & groceries!) and (d) entertainment (TV, Netflix)! 

Then I got down to breaking these 8 hours even further. After I factored time spent with family, and time taken to complete all the daily chores, and also factored the time slippage in between tasks, I figured that I can manage about two hours per day to pursue my passion, and to work on my body, on my mind & on my soul. Maybe on a good day, I can squeeze in a few more minutes. But more than that was just impossible. Saturdays and Sundays I considered as bonus time!

But then the next thought was why was I not able to utilize these two hours so far? Surely it was possible (difficult, for sure! But not impossible). That’s when I had my first epiphany!

Epiphany No 1 – “I have a problem of prioritization (read – procrastination).”

As they say, any task that we have tends to fill up the available time at our disposal. So, unless I zealously guarded my two sacred hours every day, other things were surely to eat into that time. Which is exactly what was happening so far.

I realized that almost every day my sacred two hours were at risk. All I had to do was to look back at the time spent over the last few weeks; and think about the varied contingencies I had to deal with at the time. In just those few weeks, I had a medical emergency in the family, a leaky roof at home to deal with, some urgent work projects that spiraled well into my personal time, and a festival (so guests and celebrations)!  I realized that however much I planned my week, there were always things that would happen which I did not anticipate. That’s when I had my second epiphany.

Epiphany No 2 – “A Perfect Day is a Myth.”

In reality, anything can go wrong at any time. That is how life is. And all we can do (and ought to do) is to navigate our time around whatever life throws at us. If we (incorrectly) think we can change things that are beyond our control, it will only lead to frustration (which is exactly what was happening to me so far).

This change in perspective was extremely liberating! At that moment, I decided that each morning from that day onwards, I must wake up to the fact that there will be an unplanned event which will potentially throw my day off gear. All I could to do was to navigate around it. No complaining.

As I reflected more, I had a ‘eureka’ moment when I realized that I can mix the two epiphanies together. I thought to myself, “What if I prioritize working on my body, mind and soul in the stillness of early mornings, before the vagaries of life take over?”

And I came up with the following formula: A perfect day is a myth. But if I reshuffle my priorities, I can still have a perfect morning!

That’s when I remembered the book “Miracle Morning” by Hal Elrod, that I had read back in 2015 (but had not followed the advice from that book). Sometimes, we have things that we need in life right in front of us, and we tend to miss those until the time is right. I think that Monday night was the right time for me

In the Miracle Morning, Hal Elrod talks about nailing our mornings. The book’s sub-title reads, “The Not So Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life Before 8 AM”. In the book, Elrod explains how we can take out one hour from each day (he prefers the 5-6 AM slot) to work on ourselves. He calls this method as S.A.V.E.R.S. – which is nothing but an acronym for Silence, Affirmations, Visualization, Exercise, Reading and Scribing (another word for Journaling).

According to Elrod, a right morning routine helps us to learn, grow and improve on multiple facets in our lives. And when this improved version of ourselves goes out about the day, it has the potential to improve our motivation, energy and productivity in everything we do. Elrod goes on to say that it is no wonder that most successful people are early risers. Success, after all, was simply a handful of principles done right, one morning at a time. There are many books on this topic, such as Robin Sharma’s – The 5 AM Club. However, Elrod’s book resonated with me the most.

Armed with this realization, I slept peacefully for the remainder of that fateful (or fruitful?) Monday night. I told myself that the only task that I had now was to focus on waking up early. Working backwards, I realized that if I sleep early, it will be easier to wake up before sunrise, and to work on my own version of S.A.V.E.R.S.

I also affirmed to myself that I will no longer snooze my alarm. One of my friends always says, “If you snooze, you lose”. He’s so right!

Now I’m pretty pumped up to start working on my morning routine and am keenly looking forward to it. Perhaps I’ll share my learnings in a blog post in future (similar to how I published my learning from the 100 days push ups challenge).

Concluding Thoughts

In the busyness of life, we tend to miss out on our life’s priorities. I’ve seen many people (myself included) waiting for things to improve or existing circumstances to change before planning to change themselves (e.g.: inculcating a healthy lifestyle; or working on a dream project). Little do they realize that the current “busyness” of life will continue, and tomorrow will be no less stressful or less busy than today. If you bump into a friend and ask them “How’s Life?”, the most common answer is “I’m just busy with my routine”. And the routine is nothing but the mundane things in life. Going through the motions.

Ultimately, it is up to you to change. No one is going to parent you to improve on the areas where you are falling short, or where you wish to improve yourself. Only you have the power to make changes to your schedule and to take action (despite all the imperfections through the day) to become a better version of yourselves. Some days you will win. Some days, not so much. However, if you decide to wait for that Perfect Day to rise (like I erroneously did), then you will only keep waiting. The choice, ultimately, is yours.

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