Breakfast Chats: Getting Back to Routines
Thinking about making this series a regular.
Welcome back to Breakfast Chats; the extra series I started last year, as a thank you for helping make this newsletter a bestseller on Substack. I got so much love on it when I posted it back in October, that I’ve been wanting to do another one for you guys. And so here we are ☼
But before I begin, for newer subscribers, let me do a quick recap of what Breakfast Chats really is? It’s a series where I share short musings, conversational tidbits about life things (and if you were there during the old-school blog times, it’s also inspired from my own “Fridays” posts that I used to do). It’s meant to be a mix of stuff, like the kind you talk to your friends over at a breakfast meetup, hence the name. And also, maybe with some thoughts that can stay with you and me, add value in some way. While the monthly issues are longer essays & stories, my plan is to keep a lightness to this series with shorter chats. And essentially be that easy weekend read that feels comforting and wholesome.
I think that’s it. So, let’s get going ☼
1. Reset Days. We got back home to Sydney in early January and have since been slowly getting back to usual life. Nabeel was off from work, so we took some days to rest and recover from the long travel and our very busy trip to Pakistan. We didn’t actually plan it this way, but it turned out to be a reset month for the both of us. Our mornings were lazy, late nights, scattered routines. Both of us didn’t feel like cooking so we either ordered in or made quick meals. Our weekly load of laundry would get tossed into the guest room, and we’d only fish through the piles of clothes when we needed something. We watched movies together, had late night snacks, chatted about life.
You know, it’s really so important to have healthy discipline and good routines, but it’s equally important to enjoy reset days, where you pause all kinds of structure and just breathe. Because much like nature, I think human beings are also seasonal. Not just in terms of summers and winters, but also phases of life. Like, when you’re going through things that aren’t everyday occurrences, for example moving homes or a tight work deadline. Or larger life things like grief, heartache, loss, illness, we need to emotionally hibernate and allow our mind & body to recenter.
I remember I used to feel that dropping off a routine that I had worked hard to set in place, meant I had failed in some way; that I had to sustain it every single day for it to actually mean something. And so, whenever I’d fall of track for legit life reasons, it would make me question my commitment, make me feel some strange form of guilt. But you know what I realised? Anything you do for yourself should enhance the quality of your life, not hold you hostage to it.
And it made me understand that a successful routine is not a 365 day, 24/7 thing. A successful routine allows space to breathe, to let go of it when you need to & to readapt when it’s time. Sometimes we can choose to be all over the place and that’s okay.
And you know what the best part is? Once you develop a trust and attachment to your healthier habits, vs feeling confined by them, you automatically start craving them when it’s been enough.
You basically find the rhythm within your routine.
And so now after some days of indulging our “seasonality”, we’ve gradually started slipping back into doing all the things that make us feel healthy and centered and it feels great.
2. Making healthier plates. We properly got back into the kitchen this week and I’ve been looking up and trying out new recipes. When the year started, one of the things I really wanted to do was commit to making healthy meals for us where we can ideally eat from most, if not all, food groups, as much as possible. Particularly for lunch, because we used to throw together very random things, and I wanted to change that.
So last Sunday, I found this burrito recipe that looked good, prepped for it to have stuff ready to go in the fridge. And then all through this week, we had some yummy burritos at lunchtime. They’re filling and healthy and don’t take much time at all, once you prep. I’m linking the recipe for you guys here.
3. Organizing, Decluttering. I’ve decided that the theme of my life for a few weeks is going to be organization. After a full year of using your home, things do get moved around a little, some drawers need a bit of an extra deep clean, stuff like that.
So, when we were getting back into our routines, we also made a list of all the home things we want to do each weekend, and assigned them to either the both of us, or individually. Our first project is to start with the garage and fully sort it out. And as we keep going, hopefully in some time, we should be feeling much lighter when it comes to our belongings.
I started doing this as a regular thing sometime back and now each year it seems that we manage to reduce a little more of what we own. I think how much we have in our homes not only carries a certain psychological weight but also increases the amount of work we have to do to maintain it, which sometimes takes away from quality things like spending time on your relationships, your hobbies, your dreams, your rest-to-do-nothing time.
By the way, I’m nowhere near being a minimalist, but minimising vs what you currently own, is something anyone can do and like any acquired habit, I think it continues to feel better with time.
4. I love late evenings. You know, that time of the day when you’re done with dinner, just about done cleaning up in the kitchen, the lights are low, and you’re mentally preparing to get into bed. It’s that little window of time when you’re slowly letting go of the present day and thinking about the next morning. And it’s almost like you’re suspended between two times.
And why I love that is because I think, one is like that gentle farewell to the current day, that tells you no matter what happened, time will always turn. Good or bad, it will diffuse into tomorrow. And the other is that soothing promise of a new day, where you know, that you always have the chance to start fresh. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like for this surreal, powerful feeling that it holds, late evenings are one of the more special parts of a day.
5. Friday night plans. The both of us look forward to our Friday night plans all week and because we’ve been retired at heart since our 20s, it’s almost always a cozy night in. So later tonight, Nabeel will be making us steaks with some garlic potatoes on the side, and we’ll be enjoying a not-so-fancy candlelit dinner on the couch with a new movie on Netflix.
And that’s it for our breakfast chat. Happy weekend. The regular edition for February will land in your email in about two weeks.
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