Just as every season through the year has its own flavour, every hour of the day has its own flavour.
And just like part of appreciating every day, appreciating every moment, and celebrating the unique flavour of each moment, I find it helps to bring out that feeling of aliveness.
So for the day, of course we have sunrise.
Sunrise really brings out that feeling of beginning, and starting something new, and just appreciating the raw beauty of nature, that we have the quiet night and then followed by suddenly the sun rising and there’s full colours and light really returning to the earth, almost like the day being born.
It might not usually feel that way.
It might feel like oh, another day of having to wake up and do work.
But it is there to be appreciated at any time.
It’s like so much of what’s going on in the world: we don’t necessarily have to think about it, because it’s so basic that we tend to think about all the complex and specific problems and issues that we have to deal with every day.
But those simple things are all there at any time.
And same with the nighttime.
The nighttime: the feeling of nighttime, the the quietness and the darkness.
Just like the stars: the stars are there throughout the day, but the brightness of the sun makes them invisible.
And at night, when this main light is gone, there’s instead all those subtle faint lights can be seen.
So it’s almost like that with consciousness, that we have this sort of daytime consciousness of dealing with the major issues, seeing the important things, doing work, and seeing all the obvious things.
Night is like a time for all the subtle things.
The subtler things can come out, and we can observe some of those details at night.
So we have this rhythm happening day after day, that we can appreciate the different feeling that we get at each of these different times of day.
And when it comes to state of mind through the day, I like the idea of waking up with ambition and falling asleep in humility.
When we wake up every day, we now have the ability to go out and do something with the day.
Any day has a chance to be a very special day.
I mean, every day is going to be unique in one way or another, and we have the chance to do so much in one day, to have such unexpected things happen, to have life change in one way or another, to somehow advance the cause, advance whatever we believe in, whatever we’re working on.
We have the ability to achieve something every day, or at least to change in some way, or to have something special happen in each day.
And so we can begin the day with ambition to really seize that day and do something with it.
But then by the end of each day, we get to time to go to sleep, and then it’s time to let ambition take a rest, because sleeping is kind of like we’re giving up.
We have to give up any immediate ambitions, at least kind of defer the ambition till tomorrow morning, and just say OK, whatever happened today, no matter how good or how bad it was, that is the end of that day, and there’s nothing more that can be done with this day.
I can simply accept OK, that was the day, and accept the humility of not making any further changes to that day and not doing anything more, and then just resting in peace for that night.
And then when the next morning comes, can begin again.
So we have this rhythm, again, that we can seize every day.
And the rest of this series looks at some other things that can really- ways of looking at our day that can interfere with our day, such as computers Working with computers and electronics: it’s like this world of 24-hour life, 24 hours of bright lights in our face.
There is no day and night cycle in the world of electronics, really.
It’s just always there, and computers don’t sleep.
The electronics are there to work at any time.
And so if we get too plugged into our electronics, we kind of lose sight of that daily cycle.
And finally, I look at just a few special types of days.
Maintenance day: sometimes just like to take a day to do nothing but cleaning, sorting things out, just letting there be a day where nothing new comes up, but just setting the foundation for the next day.
I like to do this sometimes on a Sunday.
It’s a good way to just sort of let the week rest, let myself be refreshed, and get everything in a good state to begin the new week.
Deep rest, a rest that is more than even a regular night’s sleep, more than even a weekend.
Sometimes we just need to take a complete break from everything and just have a day to completely step outside our whole routine, to just let life be completely new.
Let the routine disappear.
There’s so much about scheduling, so much about planning and organizing.
Sometimes that just has to be completely let go of, and we can simply have a day that is just a day.
Simple as that.
So these rhythms of time in the year and in the day I find can help to bring out the feeling of being alive at each step of the way.
#rhythmsoftime #hoursanddays #dailycycle