Early morning sky and morning ritual

Every morning ( except Shabbat) after I wake up I stumble into the living room to work out.

 

If you had told me that this would be my morning ritual when I was growing up I would have laughed.

I went to a Jewish day school. It was a place where the chess and the debate and the math teams competed fairly well against our Eastern Massachusetts competition.  We didn’t even have sports teams.

In elementary school we did have gym. I was so uncoordinated, so weak  and had such terrible eye –hand coordination that even at my school I was always chosen last for any game.

When my husband first met me he encouraged me to do yoga stretches. It was something that we did together.

Eventually I got into working out.  I used to take some aerobics classes.  I was enthusiastic but was hopeless at remembering any sort of choreography. As soon as I learned part three of a dance move, part 1 would float out of my head.

Eventually I bought myself some weights and some workout tapes. About twenty five years ago I had an epiphany as I was trying to follow the dancing women in the work out tape . ( My daughter used to call them “the ladies with the funny underpants”) What I realized aside from the fact that 1980’s work out wear did resemble funny underpants, was that I didn’t have to be good at doing the tape , as long as I worked out consistently.

 

So every morning, (except Shabbat) I get up early and work out. there are many rewards for this ritual. Some of them come in the guise of spectacular morning skies.