OUR LIVES #1 – The comforts of routine

My first blog is a comment on a prosaic and ubiquitous subject, the comforts of routine. Life is a seamless cycle of sleep and activity. It flows until it stops. It is dynamic like the rhythms of any given day. A lot of the cycle is repetitive; putting on socks, for example. Do we just drag them on or roll them first? Do we think about it? Much of the time is spent in tasks that range from boring to frustrating; commuting on a crowded freeway for example. Some activities are tedious; washing the car, trimming a hedge. Many times we are a caricature of the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, looking at our watch late for an appointment, on the run.

We can divide much of our lives into time wasted as opposed to time well spent. A boring date in which we just don’t hit it off, wasted. A terrific movie, well spent. A dull class, wasted. An exciting basketball game in which we hit a couple of tres, well spent. On any given day we might run through a full spectrum of emotional reactions ranging from satisfaction to disappointment, calm to anger, anxiety to gratification and so on. We don’t keep a quantifiable record of this, ranking every experience of every day from 1-10. We just move on without pause or reflection to the next experience. That’s the way it is for most of us. At the end of the day we are tired, in the morning in varying states of readiness for the challenges and uncertainties that surely await us. If we are lucky we will experience 30,000 of these cycles before we reach the end of our finite life. Which brings me back to the subject. Finding comfort in routine is an exercise in experiential greed. It involves milking every given moment of your life for the most gratification. How do we do this? The first step is to work on what Zen and Yoga proponents teach. Live each given moment as if there is no other. Focus all of your consciousness on the current activity, whatever it is. How many times have we nearly had a collision because we were driving while distracted, thinking about something else. To live in the moment is to dedicate everything we have to what we are doing. When we begin to do this, repetitious tasks become a calm cycle of beginning and end. We experience a satisfaction in the process and gratification on completion. It is the antitheses of approaching the things we do with either dread or “just can’t wait till it’s over”. Routines can become the interstices that bind the variables. We all know people who enjoy washing a car or washing dishes, or weeding a garden. The pleasure is enhanced by engaging fully in the task and not letting your mind wander in anticipation of the next obviously pleasurable experience. Every sequential task becomes a meditation, a source of calm. We take comfort in repeating what we know and enjoy. Tea at around 4 in the afternoon. Coffee mid-morning. A good single malt at 5. Frying an egg. Washing a pot. Coming up with something clever. Watching the circadian rhythms of life, the slight changes of color at the tips of a branch of a tree in the late winter that signals the end of dormancy, the rolled fiddle end of a fern frond, the endless varied pattern of the sky, the blazing smile of a child. Finding a solution to a problem on the job. Loving another and giving of yourself. Sharing a glance of understanding. Any and all with the laser-like focus that we are capable of if we work on it from day to day. A cliché? Not for me. And at this moment gaze at the violet pendulous effulgence of the wisteria.

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