Sunday Morning Coffee (Even If You Don't Drink Coffee)

"The principal challenge is always to keep in mind the idea of improving."

— Toni Nadal

There is something about Sunday mornings that I have always liked.

The world seems quieter. There is usually less urgency, fewer commitments, and for a brief moment it feels as though the day has not yet decided what it is going to become. I have always liked the image of someone sitting quietly with a cup of coffee, reading a book, thinking, or simply enjoying the silence.

The funny thing is that I do not even drink coffee.

Still, I have always thought that the coffee was never really the point. It represents something else. It represents beginning the day intentionally instead of allowing the day to simply happen to us.

Lately I have been thinking about mornings because I have noticed something curious about myself. At night, I usually have very good intentions. I tell myself that tomorrow morning I will wake up, read a few pages of a book, spend a few minutes reflecting or praying, perhaps do a little exercise, and begin the day calmly before opening my email or social media.

Then morning arrives.

Suddenly my brain has a completely different plan.

It starts negotiating immediately: "You can read later." "Just check Facebook for a minute." "It won't hurt to look at the news first." Somehow those arguments sound perfectly reasonable before I have even finished waking up, and before I know it, twenty minutes have disappeared.

That has made me wonder something that is much more interesting than whether I have a good morning routine:

Who is actually making the decisions?

The person who went to bed the night before with clear intentions?

Or the sleepy version of me that wakes up trying to negotiate with every good habit?

Sometimes I think that even sitting quietly with a cup of coffee, despite the fact that I do not drink coffee, would probably be a better beginning than reaching for my phone before I have even given the day a chance to begin.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that this has very little to do with coffee and a great deal to do with habits. Our minds become incredibly efficient at repeating yesterday. They naturally choose what is familiar, comfortable, and easy. Unfortunately, those habits do not always move us toward the person we want to become.

That does not mean our minds are our enemies. In many situations habits are incredibly helpful. We do not have to think about how to brush our teeth or drive to work because our brains have learned those routines. The challenge is that our brains do not distinguish very well between habits that help us and habits that quietly waste our time. Once a habit becomes automatic, it tends to stay automatic until we intentionally replace it.

Tio Toni

A few months ago I listened to something Toni Nadal said that stayed with me. Around our house I sometimes jokingly refer to him as Tío Toni. Part of it is simply because I have listened to so many interviews and conferences that he almost feels familiar, but there is another reason as well. His philosophy fascinates me. His devotion to discipline, the emotional regulation with which he approaches challenges, and the pragmatism with which he looks at life remind me very much of the values I grew up with. In that sense, he feels like another uncle whose advice is worth listening to.

That does not mean I agree with everything. I think he is probably stricter than I could ever be, both with myself and with others, and that level of discipline certainly has its own costs. Even so, I deeply admire his mental strength, his intellectual honesty, and his ability to focus on what can actually be controlled. One idea of his, in particular, has stayed with me: our minds have to learn to obey us.

That sounds simple until you try it.

Most of us have experienced that strange contradiction. We genuinely want to exercise, yet we stay on the couch. We want to read, yet we scroll through social media. We want to spend more time with our families, yet we lose ourselves in distractions that, if we are honest, we will barely remember a week later.

I do not think that means we are lazy.

I think it means that self-government is much more difficult than giving advice to someone else.

One Choice at a Time

This is one of the reasons I appreciate what Tío Toni says about improvement. He does not seem obsessed with perfection. He talks much more about becoming a little better than yesterday. I like that because it changes the goal completely. Instead of expecting myself to wake up tomorrow as a perfectly disciplined person, perhaps I only need to make one better decision than I made today.

That has also changed the way I think about failure.

There have been many mornings when I have done exactly the opposite of what I intended the night before. For a long time I saw those mornings as evidence that I simply lacked discipline. More recently I have been trying to separate my identity from my choices. Making a poor decision does not define who I am. It simply means that, on that particular morning, I made a choice that did not move me in the direction I wanted to go.

The encouraging part is that choices can change.

Identity does not have to be rebuilt every morning. Habits do.

Perhaps that is why mornings matter so much. They are not magical, and they certainly do not determine whether the rest of the day will be successful. What they do provide is the first opportunity to practice becoming the person we hope to be.

Whatever the routine looks like, I hope it begins with a conscious decision instead of an automatic habit:

• Maybe that practice begins with reading a few pages of a book.
• Maybe it begins with prayer or meditation.
• Maybe it begins with a walk.
• Maybe it begins with a quiet breakfast.
• Or maybe, despite not drinking coffee, I should finally sit down with a warm cup simply because it reminds me to slow down.

Because perhaps the real question is not whether we have a morning routine.

Perhaps the real question is this:

Who is making the first decisions of the day?