Why You Should Read In The Morning

It is good to begin your day with some reading, fifteen or twenty minutes, maybe even thirty, with which you can cleanse your mind of whatever filth you have spent your slumber dreaming up, and rid yourself still of the lingering thoughts, emotions and worries of the previous day.

I would say that it doesn’t matter what you read, but it does; something complicated and heavy, too complex, this can set the mind in motion too early. In turn, you burn out your mental faculties hours before they’re actually firing. But something light, perhaps motivational, whether the Bible or a text akin to that — say, a self help book — can deliver a mixed cocktail of motivation and thought-provocation to remain intoxicated with before you go on your merry way.

Modern life is an anathema to this, however. From the minute we wake now, we are inundated with tasks. If it isn’t our family that needs tending to, then it is work, which doesn’t start at the beginning of the day, no sir; work begins before it ends, overnight, as the emails pile up, and whatever was not done yesterday persists long into today, then follows us around like a stalker, an anxiety that does not relinquish its grip on us until the task is complete or, better yet, we have left the job in which we are at present moment employed.

Aside from this, there are buses to catch, ferries to take, subways to ride. There are traffic lights to sit in front of, bumpers to look at, podcasts and news programs to numb ourselves with. We look out at a world that it in…