When I wake up, wash my face, and make myself a hot drink, I feel energized and ready to work. Engineering is the one profession I've ever wanted, and there's always the thrill of designing systems, building, testing, fixing, solving problems. My professional work (my logical brain) is exactly what my emotional brain enjoys doing, and that's one of the lotteries I feel I've won in life (another lottery I still hope to win is mutual love with someone I see as my soulmate. I learned the hard way how rare it is to find her, and how much of a lottery it is to get that love back.)
A few hours into the morning, I start to feel things. Hunger for lunch, boredom from a long meeting, joy from laughing with colleagues, the hype of a good Spotify playlist. As the workday winds down, my engineering mind starts to cool. I hit the gym, get home, and open my personal computer to keep working on my own projects.
I don't usually plan or design my projects in those after-hours. My brain isn't as sharp by then. Most of my planning happens on weekends and the weekday evenings are mostly for coding and debugging.
Since there's less deep thinking involved in the evenings, and since my own projects bring me more joy than my day job does, I notice my feelings taking over more than my logic. I can say, confidently, that by then I feel more than I think.
After sunset, early into the night, I do chores. Load or unload the dishwasher, light cleaning, laundry, maybe a quick dinner. This is when my engineering brain is fully spent, and only feeling and body are left. The body isn't spared, either. the workout and the housework have taken the muscles down with it.
And then it's late night, with only one thing left standing: the emotion. the feeling.
This is my daily peak for sensing. Whatever energy my brain has left goes entirely into feeling: love, hate, longing, worry, hope, embarrassment, pride. I can't feel my feet anymore, but I feel, with total clarity, the guilt of having accidentally hurt someone at some random moment five years ago.
Lately, missing is the strongest feeling that finds me each night. It's as if every brain cell that helped me push through hard engineering problems all day, and every muscle cell that helped me lift weights, spent their effort so that by night, all I can do is ache for the loved ones I miss. It's painful. Especially since I'm no longer in touch with most of them. I can't tell them how much I miss them, or the memories we built, back when I was happiest.
So yeah. A powerful saudade is my nightly routine. I might skip a workout, or miss a workday from catching a cold, but I don't remember a night I fell asleep without it finding me first.