The Fifteen-Minute Morning

I’m not a “morning routine” person.

I don’t wake up at 5am to seize the day. I don’t scribble affirmations into a leather journal while holding a mug with the word breathe on it. I’ve got nothing against those people — I’m just not one of them.

But I do have this one small ritual. And over time, it’s become the most stable part of my day.

I give myself fifteen minutes. No screens. No noise. No scrolling. Just a quiet, almost invisible stretch of time before the world starts making demands.

There’s no performance to it. I don’t try to be productive. I don’t try to be inspired. I just move through the same loose rhythm: water on for coffee, blinds cracked open, a glance at the sky. Some mornings I feed the birds. Some mornings I just watch them ignore me completely.

If that sounds like nothing — it kind of is. But it’s also everything.

There’s something powerful about doing a thing with no witness, no reward, and no need to explain it. The ritual isn’t about preparing to be useful. It’s about reentering the day on my own terms — quiet, unrushed, unscripted.

Some days it feels like prayer. Other days it’s just fifteen quiet minutes between sleep and noise. But even that — even just that — is enough.

Because without it, I’m dropped into the day like a body tossed from a moving car. I’m reacting before I’ve even arrived. That fifteen minutes is the difference between being in the day and being dragged by it.

It’s a small rebellion, really — against velocity, against pressure, against the idea that every moment has to be leveraged or maximized. This is a moment I don’t leverage. I just live it.

And the irony is, everything else runs better because of it. Not perfectly. Not smoothly. But better. I’m not trying to “optimize.” I’m just trying to show up with some part of myself still intact.

If you don’t have something like this, find it. Not the one that’s trending. Not the one in that article. The one that actually fits you.

It doesn’t have to look like anything.
It just has to feel like yours.

What’s your version of this?
The quiet thing you do for no one but yourself — before the world rushes in.

— Lawrence

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