Rebuilding Rob

As WordPress continues to recycle old prompts, I pulled another prompt from The Coffee Monsterz Co to respond to today

What is typically the first thought when you wake-up?

Opening my eyes.

Sorry. I couldn’t resist.

There is an early, season one episode of Star Trek. The Next Generation titled “Datalore” where Data meets his evil twin brother Lore. We, as the audience also learn some pieces to Data’s origin. We discover that Data (Brent Spiner) was discovered, alone  at an abandoned colony, by a group of Starfleet officers . When one of his current Enterprise comrades asks what is the first thing he remembers, Data -literal to a fault – replies “opening my eyes”

But in all seriousness, usually my first thought when I wake up in the morning is what time it is. I immediately start wondering how long I slept. More to the point I wonder how much time I have left to sleep before I have to be up for the day.

Sometimes, instead of immediately wondering about how I slept or how much longer I’m able to sleep, I start thinking about my approach to the day. I suppose, by default, I am a morning person. After all as a school teacher, I start my day probably before Some other people start to typical 8 to 5 or 9 to 5 office jobs. But over the years, I have found that so much of how my day goes is dictated by my approach. If I wake up in a good mood, eager to get the day started, I find that things usually go well. This might be the only thing I actually like about being an early riser. It always gives me the sense that I get a jumpstart on my day before the rest of the world does.

But beyond feeling ambitious, there are days where my anxiety is higher than others. Occasionally, I almost have to will myself to get out of bed and get ready to face the world again.  When dealing with my students, sometimes I’ll see that they do come in in the morning and they are in a rough spot for one reason or another. I usually say something to them like “yeah but you got up, you got out of bed and you decided to face the world for one more day. Sometimes that’s the most important thing you’ll do all day today”. There are times where we all need to take a moment, take a few hours or maybe even take a day just to regroup and gather ourselves. sometimes we need to just take a day and recharge. But I also think it’s important to get up, step outside and face the world with whatever you’ve got in the proverbial tank. 

Wow, this got a little bit heavier than I expected this morning. I thought I was gonna be all clever with my “opening my eyes“ line and just call it a day.

It’s Ironic that I am talking about facing the day as I am waking up this morning. Typically I try to finish these blog entries the night before and schedule them to post at 5 AM local time. I didn’t do that with today, so I’m actually finishing it up on Tuesday morning. Right now, I’m getting ready to go see Veronica for breakfast. not that that’s anything that I have to force myself out of bed for. We’ve done a couple breakfast dates before where she had to go into work in the morning herself.

This week was supposed to be my week with kid 2. However, Monday night, X2 had to put one of their family dogs, whom I’ll call G, to sleep. I’ll devote separate post to G later today. Kid 2 had asked on Monday night if he could just stay at his mom’s house for the evening. I was completely fine with this, as I figured I didn’t want to bring kid two over to my house as if to say “your dog‘s dead kid. Now let’s go over to dad‘s“. He had a doctors appointment Tuesday afternoon that X2 took him to as well. In addition, she had asked a few weeks back about taking kid 2 out of town for the weekend, to which I agreed. But once everything happened with G, and the rescheduling kid to’s doctors appointment, it didn’t really seem to make a lot of sense for me to pick him up for 2 1/2 days. Also, I think that X2 is having a little bit of a tougher time emotionally with having to put G down than she expected. I know that I am. He hasn’t been my family dog in the five years since her and I split up, but I still miss him.

My point of all this is that today, pretty much like every day, I wake up, thinking about my approach; that is to say, I gear myself up to face the world and whatever challenges I have for the day, every single day.

Thanks for stopping by Rebuilding Rob. Be sure to like, 👍 comment and subscribe to my blog below. It’s greatly appreciated! Also, feel free to follow me on social media as well! Check out my most recent posts as well as some earlier, related posts:

• The Extra Day: A Ten-Year Memory
• Of Training Wheels and Christmas Lights
• Charity Starts at Home (And I’m Back in My Childhood One)
• The Muscle of Empathy
• Where Do We Go From Here? Five Years Since January 6.

AI art created using ChatGPT

The article “Gearing Up to Face The World“ first appeared on Rebuilding Rob