The Mindful Art of Bacon and Eggs
Meditations of Everyday Life
Ever since I read Tim Ferriss’ “4-Hour Workweek” back in my early 20’s I’ve been fascinated by the subject of lifestyle design and self-development. Through years of self-experimentation I’ve played with countless morning routines. I’ve practiced and tinkered with everything from 60 minute meditations to butter filled coffee for breakfast. There were helpful takeaways from them all, but recently it feels like I learned an important lesson.
For the first time, almost 15 years later, I feel like there’s something about my morning routine that’s worth sharing.
First, I think it’s important to point out that if you hang around the self-development circles long enough you will eventually come across a concept of self-care. I’ve come across many exercises that intend to foster some of this. Meditations, proclamations, journal entries, hand over the heart, visualizations, hugging the inner-child, you name it, I’ve probably tried it. I’m not knocking any of these practices and they all brought some unique offering whenever they found me. However, at the moment, I’m finding so much benefit in a seemingly unsuspecting and simple morning routine.
So here it is, without any more fanfare. Waking up with a reasonable amount of time, before any responsibilities beyond myself, having a coffee, and cooking myself breakfast. Groundbreaking, right?
Let’s unpack this seemingly simple routine that is serving me as well as any dedicated spiritual practice of self-care.
The key ingredients here are: time, presence, and intention. Notice how none of those ingredients are specific to complicated supplements, exercises, or protocols. It matters less what I make for breakfast, and more so that I allow myself the time to enjoy the process. I’m not frantically throwing celery and kale into the juicer and melting coconut oil for my coffee all while I’m up against the clock. I calmly prepare a breakfast that I’ve intentionally chosen for myself that nourishes the start of my day.
There are some health considerations of the meal, but all that matters less if it’s being ingested into a nervous system that is hijacked by the stress of rapidly encroaching commitments. The most optimal morning can become counter productive if it’s experienced in a negative state because of rigid ideas of what is best.
Something I discovered recently helped me to better understand the concept of self-care. Gabor Mate discusses this topic in his book, “Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder.” He essentially makes the case that scattered mental states benefit a great deal from structure, among other things. He says that regardless of one’s history, we can develop the skill of self imposed structure. He refers to this as self-parenting, in other words self-care. What does the scattered mind require to function with more focus? For me the answer was a healthy breakfast and a peaceful state to prepare and eat it in. This idea helped me to shift self-care from a fluffy platitude to a practical real life application that made a tangible difference.
When looking back at some other attempts at morning routines I can see how I could miss my intention of self-care. Meditating for 60 minutes, for example, was a powerful practice I engaged in during the lockdowns of Covid. However, once a more typical schedule returned, it made my mornings feel more pressed for time and ironically left me feeling less calm, underfed, and thus uncared for.
This became a potent reminder that doing something because we heard it’s best for us can quickly lead us away from what we actually intend if we’re not checking in with the why and how it’s being done.
What matters more than the activity is the intention. What matters more than appearance is the state of being. If my morning intention is to start by caring for myself, then at the moment it means making myself bacon and eggs with a nice cup of coffee. When I provide myself the time and space to be present, then it becomes an act of mindful self-care as powerful as any other.
Sometimes it’s not about what we do and it’s often more important how we do it. How we do one thing is how we do everything. Bringing the same intention of a meditation into my morning breakfast helps to bring the mindful state out of the vacuum and into the rest of my life. Starting my day with this practical execution of self-care has become my favourite morning routine. It has provided me with one of my most effective life-hacks, coffee while cooking bacon and eggs. It serves as a reminder that, with intention, everyday tasks provide just as much opportunity for mindful self-care as any other “spiritual” practice.
