Audemars Piguet
The Importance of a Daily Routine in the Age of COVID-19
Audemars Piguet
The Importance of a Daily Routine in the Age of COVID-19
We thought of our own parents and we stayed up at night as our hearts pounded out of our chests in anxiety. We wept uncontrollably as we saw health care workers and first responders answer the call, in many instances sacrificing their own lives for the betterment of others. And we seethed as we saw inadequate, buffoonish leadership at the very highest office of power and we again broke down in tears as we saw great men like New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo or US Navy Captain Scott Crozier rise to the challenge. We saw great leaders like Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth say to us the exact words that we needed to hear.
Here’s How it Works.
7-8 AM: Ingest the news from varying channels. Honestly I’d rather not do longer than an hour because the macabre state of the world amplified through the reporting of CNN and the BBC is like a black hole and it’s easy to get sucked in and stay glued to the screen in a semi-catatonic trance while mumbling “the horror” like Brando in Apocalypse Now.
8-9:30 AM: Work out. I don’t usually spend one and a half hours in the gym. But since I’m stuck at home, and sitting on my ass a lot, why not? I’m lucky enough to have a spin bike in my living room. So I get on that for 40-60 minutes. Now here’s the secret to cardio. How good you feel afterwards will be a direct inverse relationship to how much pain you experience during. Which means if you want that blissful orgiastic dopamine high that carries you through your day, you’ll need to headbutt your anaerobic threshold square in the face a couple of times. It helps to drink two espressos laced with Irish dairy butter just before and during. If you’re running (since most of us are still permitted outdoors once a day) say 5k I like to do four kilometers at decent consistent speed and then do the last kilometer as a series of 1 minute sprints with 30 seconds recovery.
Throughout this, my go-to watches have been the Steel PSR by Hamilton, which we’ve recently launched on Shop.Revolution.Watch and a Grand Seiko Spring Drive Snowflake in high impact titanium. Why the latter? Because there is no balance wheel, it’s got a quartz oscillator driven by a mainspring and an automatic rotor. Meaning it should be able to take any shock and recover. Though basically any Rolex, in particular one equipped with either a Parachrome or Syloxi (silicon) hairspring, is similarly tough as nails.
9:30-12 PM: Write. I can’t stress this enough. Your brain, or at least my brain, is like an old-school Presbyterian farmer who needs to feel like he’s woken up, milked the cows, mended fences, and ploughed the fields before breakfast to have an iota of self-worth. For me, cerebral inactivity (I’m sorry but binge watching Tiger King is NOT activity) is the most assured path to self-destructive depression. And so I find I have to compel myself to think and be productive such as writing this article, so ultimately I should be thanking you for reading it and therefore giving me some iota of old-school Presbyterian self-worth.
The first is to call out any overt acts of racism which have sadly exploded in virulent popularity since the outbreak of COVID-19. I would like to point out that I am not denying the fact that the Corona virus originated in China. I am just baffled how idiots in the US and Australia in particular think attacking their own countrymen of Asian descent is justifiable in any way. I am of the opinion part of this is because of racial stereotyping where they see Asians as easy targets.
The second zoom for me is a catch up with The Rake team in London each and every day at 4PM Singapore time, which is 9AM UK time. This conference call is also a sartorial call-to-arms as we collectively decided to make the meeting ‘jackets required’. And so each of us at least from the waist up is challenged to express our personal sense of style, which for me has a disturbing tendency to veer into the precarious realm of Asian pimp. But my point is that dressing well makes you feel better and also makes your realize the substantial time trying to crest the anaerobic threshold in the morning is well spent because at very least your clothes still fit. For me this is enormously important. As a fat child, I have a recurring fear, probably brought on by the indignity of my mother purchasing my jeans from the “husky” section at Sears. So if I can put on my clothes and feel good in them, I know at least some part of the maelstrom of neurosis that is my mind will be at ease. The watches I wear for these meetings tend to be smaller and more elegant. They can be round like my salmon dial, white gold Chopard L.U.C for The Rake limited edition, or they can be shaped like my salmon dial piece unique Cartier Tank Cintrée or my Jaeger-LeCoultre piece unique brown 1931 dial yellow gold watch.