Nothing defines you more than a day in your life! In one way, a day in like a perpetual prison. In the course of a day, we enter into a jail of our habituation. Just consider your typical day: brushing your teeth, rushing through a shower, browsing a newspaper, brewing coffee, chewing breakfast, a comatose commute to your place of work, an encounter with your boss, shuffling papers, ruffling tempers, commuting back home, watching a soap, cuddling a pet before finally hitting the bed. Incidentally, in this time prison of your own making you are both the jailor and the jailed.
Now consider another day that you chose for yourself: getting up a good half hour before you usually do; brushing your teeth with the wrong hand; reading a section of the newspaper you usually don't; skipping coffee for a beverage that you used to have as a kid; making your own breakfast, doing a few more stretches, walking to work; presenting your boss a book that he might read; deciding that you will not judge anybody in the office today; buying some yellow roses on your way back home; coming out to your balcony to watch the sunset; taking a musical bath with your favourite instrumental music turned on; viewing television with the sound muted; reading yourself to sleep with an inspiring story book.
A day can burn or bore you out. When you drag yourself through the rut of a routine life, you are likely to douse the flame of your enthusiasm. Routine is important; rotting is not. When was the last time that you learnt something for the first time? I know a medical doctor who fell in love and danced a salsa for the first time when he was nearly seventy years old! Alongside the rigour of routine, you require a ritual of renewal. Why? If you look around in Nature, you will see that life is never linear. A burst of activity in nature is always followed by a bout of relaxation. Life in nature is circular: changing seasons; waxing and waning of the moon, shifting constellation of stars---all of these point toward the urge for renewal and rejuvenation.
In the human being energy moves in non-linear ways. Our attention is the primary source of our energy. You can hold your attention intensely on a subject for about ninety minutes or so. After that your attention is likely to flag. Desire is another source of energy. Whatever we deeply desire will energise us to pursue the object of our desire. However, this pursuit has to be punctuated with necessary diversion. Can you kiss someone for hours without wanting to do anything else, however desirable that kiss may be? Moderation is critical to management of human energy. Moderation involves slowing down, pacing ourselves to be in synch with the rhythms of our energy.
Our emotions are deep sources of our energy. If you observe the energy associated with your emotions, you will realize that there is a waxing and waning in the movement of emotions. How long at a stretch can you feel anger or affection for someone? An hour? Two hours? You will discover that the emotions of anger and affection come and go like day and night. Emotions are energy bubbles in motion. You have to be an observer of the course of your emotion in a whole day. In the observatory that is located inside you, you will see a constellation of emotions. You will discover that anger, fear, happiness, lust, jealousy-all these emotions emerge in a pattern in the course of a day.
Take all the fifteen odd hours of waking time in the course of a single day. Divide those fifteen hours into your typical energy chunks! You will find out that you feel deeply energised during some parts of the day and thoroughly depleted of energy and enthusiasm during the rest. How do you live the rest of your day like the best of your day? Just think of this--today is the first and last day of the rest of your life? You have been given the gift of this day. How will you express your gratitude to the giver? You are not fully certain that you will wake up alive inside the same room that you will go to bed in? Not everyone in our world will wake up tomorrow on this beautiful earth? With this realization, how will you choose to live today? Just think of it before you seize the day !