Routine

I have a complicated relationship with routine.

On one hand, I fear and fight routine. It is anesthetizing. It puts my brain on autopilot. Day after day of the same old same old until I descend into senescence—that’s no life for me! Particularly when you consider that time flies faster when you’re in a routine, so if you want your life to feel shorter, by all means fill it with routine. To resist this I try to vary what I do, just by a little, breaking things up enough to force me to pay attention.

On the other hand, I have a grudging respect for routine, and I believe there are good reasons why we so often seem to prefer it. There are things I would prefer to handle on autopilot. I don’t want to think anew about everything I do. Breakfast, for example, should never be an adventure. Stepping outside our comfort zones can be rewarding, but it is also stressful. Routine can be so soothing, even palliative, particularly at times when everything else seems to be going awry.

Through my life I’ve careened back and forth between two extremes: sometimes feeling like I can get through my days without ever turning my mind on, my life having become so filled with, and governed by, routine, then other times feeling like my life is wildly out of control, completely unmoored from routine. When I wake up from the former, I send my life spinning into the latter, which in turns seems to send me back to the former, and so on.

I guess that’s sort of a routine in itself.

My current plan is to balance the two, embracing routine even more tightly where I don’t care enough to think, and rejecting routine even more thoroughly where I do care enough to think. My hope is that by nourishing that part of my mind that craves routine, I will find it easier to avoid falling into routine in areas where I’d rather stay awake.

Embracing routine is the easier part, as I find my mind naturally gravitates towards routine, but still it has been a bit challenging. So, for instance, I’ve decided I don’t want to think about what to wear in the morning, so my ultimate goal is to wear the same thing everyday, but my wife thinks this is completely insane and, were I to actually do this, I think others would feel the same. Similarly, I would prefer to eat the same thing everyday for breakfast and lunch, but I find myself in situations, such as going out to lunch socially, where that isn’t possible.

Rejecting routine has been harder. When I determined to toss aside my old music listening habits and listen to completely new music, it was wrenching at first because I still liked my old music. I soon found new music I liked, but that just led to new music listening habits. Similarly, I tried to break out of a rut in my reading but soon found myself in a new rut as I started mining a different vein. At work I sought out projects in unfamiliar areas, figuring it would be stressful but I’d get my neurons firing in new ways. Once I found some success in these new areas, though, people started sending me similar projects, and I accepted them, motivated, I must admit, by a desire to avoid the stress of the new.

So my record is decidedly mixed. The lure of routine is difficult to resist. While I toy with extreme ideas to break free from routine, such as quitting my job and living out of an RV while traveling the country working odd jobs, these, I fear, are just idle dreams of one already well down the slippery slope of routine.