Morning friend ☕️

Last Monday I showed you the list I made after waking up from heart surgery.

I promised I would come back and check it honestly, item by item.

Here is the short version: I got them back.

Coffee at home.
Laughing with my wife.
Watching my son grow up.
Walking outside in the sun.
Feeling normal again.

All five are part of my life again.

That should’ve made this an easy post to write.
It didn't.

Grab your coffee.

Let's chat!

I wrote the list at 11:39am on the morning I woke up, with the TV above my hospital bed tuned to
a radio channel.

Eighty-one days ago.

So, item by item.

Coffee at home. Yes. Most mornings since the operation.

Laughing with my wife. Yes. We laugh. We fight. We are lucky.

Watching my son grow up. School run is my favourite part of the day. New discovery - being fully immersed in the moment, vs just rushing to get to work.

Walking outside in the sun. Yes. Cape town weather makes it challenging sometimes, but a walk still feels like luxury. I wrote this in June. In Cape Town. I'd like the record to show that I was on a significant amount of medication at the time.

Feeling normal again. Maybe.

That last answer is where this post changed for me.

After the operation, I wrote that I had "a new way of seeing things."

I believed it when I wrote it.

For a while, everything really did look different. The things that normally filled my head had gone quiet. Health, family, time and the ordinary privilege of being at home were suddenly very clear.

I thought I would be more grateful after surgery.

More appreciative of what I have.

Not just while I was recovering. Permanently.

Then I recovered enough to start working again.

Not at the same pace. The energy and stamina were not there yet, so returning had to be gradual.

For now, that has given me a little more choice about being in the office every day. Some mornings I can do the school run.

Before the operation, the morning calculation felt obvious. Leave early, avoid the traffic and get to the office before the day properly starts.

It made sense for work.

It also meant missing the school run.

I had been measuring a good morning mostly by what it did for the working day.

Coming back slowly interrupted that calculation. It showed me that a morning could hold the school run and still lead into a good day at work.

The flexibility may be temporary. I haven't worked out what the longer-term arrangement looks like yet.

But once another version of the morning became possible, it was harder to treat the old one as the only sensible option.

I would not have questioned that arrangement before.

Now I do.

That is a smaller change than becoming permanently grateful. It is also a more honest one.

I am more conscious of those patterns now.

And I am challenging the old status quo instead of accepting it simply because it is familiar.

That is what I had misunderstood about change.

I expected the old patterns to disappear.

They didn't.

What changed was that I started seeing them as patterns rather than simply the way things are.

This doesn’t invalidate how I felt that morning at 11:39am. The gratitude I felt was true then, and it is still true now.

But, I am not grateful every minute of every day. I still get caught up in things that looked very small from a hospital bed.

The difference is that I catch myself now.

Not every time. Not quickly enough every time. But more than I did before.

And once I see the old pattern, I have a choice about whether it remains the status quo.

Maybe you have had one of these moments too.

A diagnosis. A funeral. Burnout. A job ending. A near-miss that briefly made everything obvious.

You came out of it certain that something would be different.

Then life became life again.

I am sitting with two different questions now:

Which old pattern has returned?

Do I relate to it differently this time?

That second question matters more than whether I have managed to eliminate the pattern entirely.

That feels more honest than giving the list a score.

I wanted to feel normal again, and mostly, I do.

I don't want to spend the rest of my life trying to recreate the intensity of waking up after surgery. That is not the goal.

I also don't want to pretend I came home as a permanently grateful, completely changed person.

I came home as myself.

The old patterns came too.

But they are more visible now, and I am less willing to leave them unchallenged.

I got another chance.

I am still working out what to do with an ordinary Monday.

That is where I am.

Until next Monday, friend ☕️

Vaugan

P.S. If you have had a moment like this, hit reply and tell me: which old pattern returned, and did you see it differently? I read every reply.