Day 4: Living the Hindu Life

After doing the full-on Hindu daily lifestyle for a couple of days now, I’ve got to say that I have mixed feelings.

According to all my research, some of the things an “ideal” Hindu should do include the following:

1. Get up before the sun rises.
2. Perform morning prayers and bathe.
3. Pay your respects to the home deity.
4. Pray and/or meditate and read from sacred texts for about 15 minutes.
5. Make breakfast, offer some to the family deity, and then eat it.
6. Do your daily tasks honestly and with devotion.
7. Perform prayers in the evening at the home shrine (with the rest of the family—unfortunately, my dogs weren’t much help with this part).

On the up side, getting up early and having a strict routine to follow did help me get a lot more done than I usually do. I kind of like having discipline imposed on me (if only by myself and this whole crazy project). I couldn’t goof off, which is very easy to do when you work at home.

On the other hand, I could really live without the “rising before the sun” thing. I used to be a morning person, and I once thought the day was wasted if the sun was up before I was. But I also ate dinner at 4:00 and was fast asleep by 9:00, so I wasn’t a morning person, really—I was just prematurely living like an 89-year-old. Now, I have a life (kind of) and things to do after 5:00 p.m., so I don’t mind the idea of still being in bed at dawn so much anymore.

Besides just getting up on time, getting right into the shower, first thing (after prayers, of course), was rough. Partly because I work from home and rarely have anywhere to be in the morning, and partly because I’m just plain lazy, I usually need some time—oh, about 4 or 5 hours—to kind of ease into the day. Most mornings, I spend a long time catching up on all the riveting TV shows I taped the night before and then roll into the shower around 11:00—on a good day.

But getting showered right away really does help kick off the day. Maybe that’s why pretty much everybody else in the world does it. Huh. You learn something new every day.

The other tough part of my new Hindu morning routine is waiting to eat. Food is basically the main motivating factor in my life. Sometimes, it’s literally the only reason I drag myself out of bed at all. So, having to wait until after prayers, a shower, more prayers, and 15 minutes of scripture really made me appreciate the lousy Special K protein shake I had for breakfast.

And I really loved the fact that I did so much during the day that I just crashed into bed at night. It’s a delightful change of pace for me. Normally, I toss and turn for hours before I fall asleep—which may explain why I’m too dazed to do much besides watch TV and eat in the morning.

So, when you add up the good and bad parts of being Hindu, overall, it’s been a positive experience so far. I’m productive, I’m slightly more energetic, I’m clean, and—well, my pronunciation of Sanskrit is coming along quite nicely.