I don't have a morning ritual. I've tried to have one — I've read the books, I've set the alarms, I've bought the journals. None of it stuck. What I have instead is a thing I do before the day starts, which is different from a ritual in ways that matter to me.
The thing is: I make coffee, I sit in the same chair, and I don't look at my phone for the first twenty minutes. That's it. No journaling, no meditation, no gratitude practice, no cold shower. Just coffee and the chair and twenty minutes without the phone.
I've been doing this for about three years. I didn't decide to do it — it evolved. I started sitting in the chair because it's the most comfortable chair in the house and the morning light hits it in a particular way. I started not looking at my phone because I noticed that looking at my phone first thing made the rest of the morning worse. The coffee was already there.
The difference between a ritual and a thing you do is intention. A ritual is intentional. It has a purpose, a structure, a meaning. The thing I do in the morning has none of that. It's just what happens before the day starts. It's not trying to be anything.
I think this is why it stuck when the rituals didn't. The rituals required me to be a certain kind of person — disciplined, intentional, committed to self-improvement. The thing I do in the morning just requires me to sit in a chair and drink coffee. I can do that. I've been doing it for three years.
The personal essays I find most useful are the ones that are honest about what actually works versus what sounds like it should work. The morning ritual industrial complex — the books, the apps, the influencers — is full of things that sound like they should work. Some of them do work, for some people. But the thing that works for you is the thing you actually do, not the thing you intend to do.
The twenty minutes without the phone is the part that matters most. I didn't understand why until I started paying attention to what happens in those twenty minutes. What happens is: nothing. I sit there. I drink coffee. I look at the light. Sometimes I think about something. Sometimes I don't think about anything in particular. The nothing is the point.
The phone is a machine for filling silence. Every silence, every pause, every moment of not-doing-anything gets filled by the phone. The twenty minutes in the chair is the only time in my day when silence is allowed to be silence. When nothing is allowed to be nothing. I didn't know I needed that until I had it.
The exploration that I find most interesting is the kind that happens in stillness. Not travel — though travel is good — but the exploration of what's already there when you stop filling it with noise. The twenty minutes in the chair is that kind of exploration. I'm not going anywhere. I'm just sitting with what's there.
The community I'm part of has been talking about this — the value of unstructured time, of not optimizing every moment, of allowing yourself to be bored or quiet or just present without an agenda. It's harder than it sounds. We've been trained to fill every moment. The training is thorough.
I'm not recommending my thing. I'm not saying you should sit in a chair for twenty minutes without your phone. I'm saying that the thing that works is the thing you actually do, and the thing you actually do is usually simpler than the thing you think you should do. Find the simple thing. Do it every day. Don't call it a ritual. Just do it.
The morning intention that I've found most useful is the intention to not have an intention. To let the morning be what it is before I start trying to make it something. The coffee and the chair and the twenty minutes are the container for that. Everything else follows from there.