Showering in the Dark

I was in the mood for a slightly different routine this morning.  The pets were all blissfully quiet--Poosa and Thackeray being the only ones to "help" me get out of bed and they settled back down to sleep, and the others were not yet awake, so I started with my morning meditation and yoga.  While I was doing my yoga I wondered what it would be like to shower in the dark (since it was 6AM and the sun doesn't rise now until 7:12AM).  I decided it would be fun to try so out I went (with Poosa, of course).  It was absolutely delightful!  Thanks to my purple boardwalk I was safe and could see my way out to the shower.  I got to play a variant on the old game Name that Tune with Name that shower gel (and I got them both--Divine Calm which has a strong lavender scent for my first choice to use with my scruffy sponge, and Strawberry as my second selection with my poofy applicator, but then those are easy scents to id).  It was also raining gently, which made the experience just that much nicer, in my opinion.  I did find that my balance was off when I did Tree Pose and Eagle Pose--I don't know if that was because of the darkness, although I could see the fence post I use for spotting, or if my balance just isn't as strong today, but time will tell.  But I figured since Thursday I will have to be showering in the dark (as Blythe will be picking me up at 6:30 for my cataract surgery), it would be good to try it out on a day when I had nothing on so if there were any glitches to iron out I could solve them before Thursday.  But it all worked perfectly and it gives me a variant to my morning routine, which is always nice.

I then thought back to how much has changed for me lately, primarily because I've allowed change in.  There was a comment on one of the blogs I follow (The Rambling Taoist) about how we are all attached to our beliefs and this attachment stops us many times from taking a different look at the world.  The writer said: When we become attached to particular ideas, concepts, objects and people, we neglect others. Some are given favored status, while others are eschewed. We overlook the opportunities presented to us because we focus too exclusively on what we already have.  I realized how very true this is and how limiting.  My daughter once said that I had to have things my way and didn't really see other perspectives.  Well, I think at some levels she was quite correct.  I used to criticize, for instance, those who said they needed lots of time to get up and going in the morning.  This was at a time in my life where I could be up and out the door in 15 minutes (which now I find mind-boggling that I was even capable of that!).  It seemed to me that those who required more time were just disorganized or had strange priorities, etc.

But now, I'm finding that in the first place there is no advantage and in fact many disadvantages to trying to move at mach speeds all the time.  I'm finding that for me, getting up earlier so I have more time for a gentler start to the day makes a lot more sense.  And of course I knew nothing about things like Body Butter, and if I had I would have said they were silly and weak.  But now, being able to enjoy healing my dry skin and myself with the liberal use of body butter, and at the same time enjoy the lovely scents and to accomplish some yoga poses which I can't quite get to normally but which I can manage with slippery skin, that all seems to be a very good thing.  To be able to take time to savor a new flavor of tea (my friend Mary introduced me to a variety of new types of tea the other day and now I'm having my first cup of Ancient Pu Erh, a black tea which is grown in a cave, and it is very nice and very different) as I type a blog post or read an e-mail, etc. seems a very good thing as well.

I'm realizing that being open to new experiences and being willing, as the blog writer went on to say, to be inclusive and not exclusive, is a liberating and freeing concept.  I am now trying things which I would never have dreamed I'd be trying.  I'm exploring in little and bigger ways, being willing to discover whether or not something works for me.  And even if it doesn't happen to be something that "floats my boat," being willing to see that it could very well be something that would be wonderful for someone else.  And so, showering in the dark, outside, in the rain, was a fantastic way to start this day!