I’ve never overslept. That can’t be the reason.
My body will always always wake up 90 seconds before my alarm goes off.
More precisely, I wake up 90 minutes before an alarm, then every 10 minutes after that.  90 seconds before the alarm goes off, I’m fully awake.
It doesn’t matter if I need to wake for work or play.
It doesn’t matter if I need to get up at 5 or 7 or 10.

It feels like a form of self-punishment. Nothing else explains it. I’ve never had a terrible experience from oversleeping. I’ve overslept exactly once in my life, and that was because my alarm wasn’t set right. It’s as though my mind knew the alarm was 12 hours off.
This was only a few months ago, so it doesn’t account for the life long habit of self-waking punishment.

Forgiveness has been on my mind a lot.

It’s a SFD to forgive myself or someone else. Sometimes its a HFD.

Ahhh, the SFD. 

I hate that in this blog I seem to come across as incapable of completing anything. I’m not. I’m the go-to gal in real life. I’m the one who everyone says, “How do you get everything done and still have such nice kids/clean home/fat ass?”

Sure, I’ll get your projects done, and hers and his and that dude’s over there. My family will be taken care of. Everything will get done, and in the classic mold of motherhood martyrdom, my own stuff gets pushed aside. My dreams, my needs, my cares. So even idea of focusing on other people in a non-work way, as the SFD should be…or, *gasp* focusing on doing a SFD for myself…gets shoved aside.  Timestamping my life for other people’s deadlines.

August was a difficult month in a lot of ways. I was feeling as though I wasn’t in control of my own time. It felt like a lot of days of doing and running and chasing and worrying.

Then the boys turned two and I saw how quickly two years can sift through a life. The SFD I did get to perform and note consciously…those seemed to slow time down briefly. They were my exhalation as will as my inspiration. They were my spiritual yoga stretch.  I let the SFD opportunities, the ones to consciously note small acts of graciousness and kindness and goodness and humor and good stuff, pass away.  I’d like to think I still did them, that they are part of my nature…in fact I can all but guarantee that I did on most days…but (a) I didn’t note them for my own well being and (b) it is on those days, those rocky craggy days we all have (and August was a craggy month at Casa de la Pick) that I most need to stop focusing in on my own navel and turn outward. 

But I “didn’t have time.”  Sound familiar?

It is said you practice yoga. You don’t “do” it. You practice meditation. You don’t “do” it.

So I’m trying not to look at it as a failure. The idea is to practice SFD every day. I did a lot more good in August than I did in July. I will practice in a timeline that I promised myself a month ago. Why do we give up on the things that feel good and are important to us. On a busy day, often exercise is the first thing we don’t do. (And by “we” I mean “I”). We comfort ourselves in cheap and fast fashion, be it with bad food or no exercise or other less-than-healthy forms of self-medication (and in this category I include wallowing in our own woe) when it is our soul crying out for care, not our appetites, and certainly not our egos.  And by “our” I mean “our.”  I can’t be alone in this.

That sense of fleeting time, the realization that I should and must stop and SFD, that it’s a priority, was my wakeup call before the September alarm…you know the one, the one that says it’s a time of renewal. Sarah Ban Breathnach says September is a time of focusing on “authentic wants…September resolutions ask only that we be open to positive change.” 

I’m waking up before I have to.  It’s a gentle good morning.  I want to keep making a difference.

To that end, I wish you all a good and lovely Labor Day weekend.  I have a rehearsal (hooray!) and a final midnight show (big hooray…I get my time back…it takes me a good 2-3 days to recover from those) and a family picnic and other family adventures.  I shall post my truncated August SFD list sometime over this weekend and continue on with my September SFD list.

Be well.