It's a small thing...

This morning, I woke up and thought, oh coffee would be good. Maybe just one more morning, just this morning, I will have coffee...and tomorrow I'll have green tea with lemon.

Last night I made a lovely salmon salad for my lunch today. And I set up my morning station to make a cup of green tea with fresh lemon juice. I did that because I feel that my morning habit of coffee is so ritualized now...part of the pain of giving up that habit would be giving up the ritual of it.

You know...wake up, no thinking, just shuffle down to the kitchen, turn on the light over the stove, go over, rinse the coffee pot and fill with cold water, pour in coffee maker, rinse coffee grounds basket, measure out coffee, close basket, push on button, let Riley out. Get creamer out of refrigerator, set out clean coffee cup, get a small spoon from the silverware drawer, get a small glass ramiken down to hold the spoon. Set sugar bowl by coffee cup. Let Riley in. Place 1tsp organic sugar in cup. Pour in coffee. Pour in small amount of organic creamer, stir. Smell, sip.

I've done that practically every morning for probably 20 years (with a few differences, like it used to be Hero that I let out every morning).

So I thought that I would need to develop a little ritual for making the green tea. But when I woke up this morning, I thought about those cookies that Cathy had brought home from the holiday party and how they'd be good with a cup of coffee. And I thought, "I don't have to not drink coffee this morning because I need to eat one of those cookies because they are here."

But the thing is...and stay with me because I know this is going to sound weird...I dreamed that I packed a backpack and went on a quest...I was looking for a woman...a real guru...and like you do in dreams, she appeared and started showing me things...completely inexplicable things like goldfish walking on stilts on the land...dozens of images like that...and she said, "the body is an amazing thing and adapts to what we need..." and then she looked at me and said, "you are perfect already...you have everything...get to that perfection."

So when I was lying in bed this morning and thinking I would have coffee this morning instead of green tea, I thought about that dream and I thought, 'okay, just this morning, I'm going to have green tea with lemon instead of coffee with sugar."

It's a small thing, I know...but a first step on the journey to giving up refined sugar.