My word for 2014 is discipline and it truly has been a guiding principle thus far. Rather than being a random word I chose out of the air or a New Year's resolution, it is something God had been impressing on me as an area He wants me to grow in. Self-discipline. Disciplining my schedule. Finishing. Following through on commitments. Not thinking about throwing in the towel.
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| HolyBelly Café, Paris. |
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| If they fed me every morning, I would be a better woman. 3 months later I can still taste these sweet, tender pancakes. |
One big area that needed discipline in my life was sleep. I am naturally a night-owl. I love to work in the wee hours, often that is when my writing flows. But when I go to sleep at midnight, am awakened at least once in the night by a child and definitively by 6:30, I am useless the next day. I prop myself up on a couple of espressos and slog on, but I feel like I have been hit by a truck, I am short-tempered and irritable with my children, and I am unmotivated in my work. As we looked a things in our daily lives that needed to improve, how to be more effective and productive, I realized getting to bed earlier would have a positive impact on everything else. Rather than working on improving in a whole bunch of ways, my aim has been primarily this one:
Go to bed.
I listen to podcasts while doing housework or cooking if the kids are not at home, asleep or playing with their papa, and a recent practical talk for church planters encouraged me to actually put sleep in my calendar. So I do. I now have a set bedtime (allowing for a few exceptions). I have a pre-set alarm on my phone and get out of bed at the same time every day (the kids helped enormously to bring rhythm into our lives, as they, like the Dowager Countess of Grantham, do not observe weekends). Then I "wind the clock" back 8 hours from that wake-up time, and that is my bedtime. And, knowing I suddenly realize I should start laundry before bed and need time to wind my brain down before I can fall asleep, I try to start heading to bed half an hour before that. Simply writing out our daily schedule at the beginning of the year helped me enormously to always have the basic times in my head of when I should be doing what. I don't always hit the mark, I don't get angry or legalistic about it, but it's a helpful guideline.
Sleep. We need it. Our overtaxed brains need to rejuvenate to be at our best. Plan it in and then take care of the rest.
