Morning’s Bliss: On Keeping the Mind Young

I love the early mornings, when the world holds its breath and my mind wakes like a small flame, flickering with new thoughts, questions, fragments of ideas, waiting their harvesting; when the day pulses with possibility.

I’ve been reading Virginia Woolf’s Diary. I like her thoughts on keeping her mind young:

“Began reading Freud last night; to enlarge the circumference: to give my brain a wider scope: to make it objective; to get outside. Thus defeat the shrinkage of age. Always take on new things. Break the rhythm, etc.” (Diary, 1939).

Similarly, I want to emulate Dr. Gladys McGarey’s wise counsel, expressed in her remarkable book, The Well-Lived Life. Regarded as the mother of holistic medicine, she was 103 when she published it.

“You have to feel and know life is there to be lived. You have to live it. As you pay attention to life itself, life is like a seed. It has a shell around it. It has all the energy of the universe within it,” she says.

It’s thus with expectation I relish my morning rush—the gift of a new day to crack life’s shell and nourish its core.

rj