Arjun Khemani

I typically don’t like routines that much. I love to do something new everyday. Something special, a new experience or learning something new. As much as I crave living like that everyday, I still, unfortunately or not, have a daily routine (which I find amazing, appreciatively) like most do. And in this blog post, I wish to share my daily routine-ritual, because my routine feels more like a ritual.

The routine that follows is a typical weekday for me now in 2021 when school is still online and there are a few restrictions imposed due to COVID-19. Filled with learning new things and experimenting and creating and other really cool stuff, let’s dive right in:

MORNING—EXERCISE: I wake up every morning between 6:00 and 6:30 AM and I drink a glass of hot water, wear my running clothes, drink a vegan banana smoothie and after putting on my running shoes, go for a run between 6:30 and 7:00 AM. My running time depends on the amount of distance I’m running. My normal runs take anywhere between 30 minutes and an hour. After I’m done running, I come back home walking which is usually a kilometer or two away from where I finish my runs.

After reaching home at around 8:00 AM now, I write for a few minutes in my journal as well as my Five Minute Journal. I record my running distance for the day. And write down things I need to get done with on that day. Feeling positive about the day, I hop into the shower, which are normally hot but cold on a few rarer occasions when I’m motivated. It’s about 8:30 AM when I’m done having a shower and I settle down for breakfast which usually consists of something heavy with a peanut butter sandwich.

At 9:00 AM then, I have online school. Which I need to attend for four hours. There’s nothing much to talk about school for now, so I’ll just fast forward to 1:00 PM when school is over and even my lunch is done with which I cheekily have while attending school. After 1:00 PM, routinely, I write an article for my blog, which happens everyday at least till now. It takes about thirty to sixty minutes depending on how fast my brain works during that time. Feeling a sense of great pride after writing and publishing another article for my blog, I have many options to choose from that aren’t really fixed on any given time. I do them whenever I wish to. I know that isn’t really professional and good because I’m not really then able to focus on tasks for a long period of time. But that’s what I do now. And these are the options that I can choose from:

AFTERNOON—LEARNING:

• I can read. Whatever book I’m currently on. (Presently reading: Next to Me: Luck, Leadership and Living with Parkinson’s by David Jones) or listen to an audiobook on Audible, whichever suits me better (Presently listening: The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman Burglar [Classic Tales Edition])
• I can learn Spanish—which I adopted to learn about a little less than a month ago (It’s amazing to learn a new language!)—either on Duolingo (an app from which I’ve been learning Spanish, that’s mostly very easy) or on a course that I’m enrolled in on Coursera on Spanish Vocabulary (That’s harder)
• I can also feed my life-long curiosity about space by making progress on yet another course on Coursera (Presently doing: The Science of the Solar System by Professor Mike Brown) or just simply reading or researching about intriguing topics on space.
• I can do a guided meditation on Headspace
• And I can do another thing that’s really creative and hard and requires a lot of motivation but I can’t disclose it off just right now. But stay tuned surely!

It’s not like I can do any of these things listed above. I do do them. Everyday. But just that there isn’t a particular time fixed for it. I do them whenever I want but I always remember to do them.

So, all of the above tasks take place from between 2:00 PM and 7:30 PM. Most days, I have one or two extra classes of school in between them as well, but rest of the time I’m doing those things. Which are absolutely very good and I love to do them all. Some days, I go out and meet a friend or something in the middle when I want to step back and relax a bit and some days I’m just doing that stuff. I generally then have dinner at around 7:30 PM while watching Netflix with my sister. It’s our ritual now, we have to watch an episode before going to sleep.

NIGHT—CONNECTING AND STARS: Then, I’ve been pursuing a habit and have maintained a streak for about a month now to go out every night after dinner or whatever and observe the sky. Because I just love space so much and this lets me connect with it more often. So I just go, even if for 5-10 minutes, and walk around a bit, head tilted upwards, looking at the stars. And when I come back, I fill up my journal and Five Minute Journal once again and sleep at around 9:00 PM.

That’s it. That’s my daily routine. I love it. It’s my routine-ritual.

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