“I begin each day of my life with a ritual,” shares choreographer Twyla Tharp in her book The Creative Habit.
“I wake up at 5:30 A.M., put on my workout clothes, my leg warmers, my sweatshirts, and my hat. I walk outside… hail a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to the Pumping Iron gym at 91st Street and First Avenue, where I work out for two hours. The ritual is not the stretching and weight training I put my body through each morning at the gym; the ritual is the cab.”
What Tharp helpfully points to is the importance of identifying rituals that move us towards healthy choices in our life.
In Daily Rituals Mason Currey offers two other examples of “cabs” – 60 coffee beans and the light before dawn.
Currey shares how every morning Beethoven counted out 60 beans from which he’d make a cup of coffee. Then he’d begin to compose music. Author Toni Morrison always woke at 5:00 A.M. to “watch the light come.” She explained how “writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit… For me, light is the signal in the transaction. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives.”
Do you have a cab, 60 beans, or waking right before the dawn that marks you are ready to care for your body, mind and soul?
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