routine
The thing about being a creature of routine, as I am, is that it becomes very easy to fall into all-or-nothing thinking when it comes to said routine. I have an order in which things should get done in the morning. 5:30: wake up, brush my teeth, drink water, write three pages longhand. 6:30: break for coffee, meditate, work on my current writing project. 7:30: exercise then start to get ready for work.
Of course, this doesn’t always fall out as planned. I get distracted, or I wake up late, and even ten minutes of snoozing throws off the entire schedule. I minimise the possibility of getting sidetracked by having a distraction blocker in place, but that doesn’t do anything for books, my RSS feeds, my TBR list of interesting articles, or sites that I haven’t blocked for whatever reason. And then of course, everything goes out the window when I’m not well (as I have been this week, slogging my way through to the other side of a cold that hit me like a truck after a really busy period at work—isn’t that always the case, somehow).
The problem with routine entrenchment is: when I don’t manage to finish my pages and break for coffee by 6:30am, or I don’t manage to start exercising by 7:30am, I think, well, that’s gone. And then even if I do have a window of time later in the morning or in the day, I just don’t do it, because the planned time has already come and gone. It seems wildly irrational when I write it out like this, but I struggle with that kind of mental flexibility because I have such a fixed picture in my head of how my day should go.
I don’t have a nice solution, only awareness. I like planning things. I like when things go to plan. I don’t like deviations. But as I begin to figure out what long-term sustainability looks like when it comes to building a life around things I value—sleep, exercise, creativity, friends, family, curiosity, learning, just to name a handful—I think I also have to understand that I’ll always have opportunities to nudge my life in these directions, even when my plans lapse. I slept in this morning. It’s lunchtime now. I can sit for a while and do the things I didn’t get to do before work today, just a little bit, and that’ll be better than not doing them at all. Routine is helpful, but so is knowing how to carry on when your routine breaks.