Stoic coffee break review12/31/2023 ![]() ![]() Early, the obligations of life existed only in theory and not in fact. Early, she was confident and clearheaded and full of energy. It was the precious early morning hours between the parting dark and the rising dawn, before her boys uttered the word Mama, before the pile of manuscripts from work demanded her attention, before the commute, before the phone calls, before the bills beckoned, before the dishes needed to be done, it was then she could be a writer.Įarly, she was free. Her job as an editor for Random House occupied her days, her children every other minute, and by the late evening she was burned out, too tired to think. Because at the beginning of her career, Morrison was also a single working mother of two young boys. It enables me, in some sense.”īut of course, it was as practical as it was spiritual. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. For me, light is the signal in the transition. “Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact,” she’d later reflect, “where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. She did this for years, practicing this secular ritual used not just by writers, but by countless busy and driven people for all time. She’d sit at her desk in her small apartment, and as her mind cleared and the sun rose and the light filled the room, she would write. In the dark, she would move quietly, making that first cup of coffee. It was early, always early, when Toni Morrison awoke to write. As I said in Discipline is Destiny, this decision we make in the morning, it not only determines how our day will go but it determines who we are. It was an important early lesson in discipline. I printed out the full passage and put it on the wall next to my desk.Īt the time, that advice was a helpful reminder to myself to get off my ass, to stop being lazy, and to work hard. A guy reluctant to get out from under the blankets and put his feet on the cold floor-just like the rest of us. So it was amazing to read the most powerful man in the world chiding himself for wanting to stay in bed. Stuck in an early class I could never seem to get motivated for, my lower self desperately wanted to blow it off. It was before I dropped out of college, and I was having a similar back-and-forth with myself most mornings. I first read a passage from Marcus Aurelius about this in his Meditations when I was 19 years old. “And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?” “Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants, and the spiders and the bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can?” he said to himself but also to us. “I have to go to work-as a human being,” he said, hauling his feet up and onto the floor. “Is this what I was created for?” he said to himself. ![]() Like any normal person, a deep part of Marcus did not want to wake up, instead wanting to “huddle under the blankets and stay warm,” he would say. It could have been somewhere along his frequent and arduous travels across the empire-in Asia Minor or Syria, Egypt, Greece, or Austria.īut chances are it was at the palace in Rome. It could have been in his tent on the front lines of the war in Germania. One morning in the middle of the second century AD, the most powerful man in the world was awakened by his orderly. ![]()
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