If you didn’t read last week’s column, the brief summary is that our lives don’t turn out the way we think they would. We imagine futures, but that projection never becomes reality. Check it our here.
As a follow up to that, or perhaps as a corollary or response, it seems to me we often establish routines. We do this for many reasons. One, I believe, is to fight the uncertainty of what we don’t know. Or, when our world doesn’t turn out the way we thought it would. The routine helps even out our false/inaccurate projections, and gives us a sense of balance.
You have many examples in your life, I’m confident. When I bicycled close to 4,000 miles across North America in 1982, I faced the unknown. Each day was as new as it could be. I had no idea what to expect. My life was cut loose.
Not knowing the road ahead, the weather, how people driving by me would act, the terrain, I needed a rope, a security blanket. I didn’t know this at the time. I realized this later.
What happened over the four months I pedaled was that I established a routine to root myself, to make myself comfortable. It started each morning.
Waking up to the rising sun, I’d get out of my one-person tent, take the mandatory leak, and grab my water bottle, dosing myself for the hard day ahead. Food was next. Some granola, perhaps an apple or banana, and I was fortified. Take down the tent. Fold the sleeping bag. Pack them both on the back of the bicycle. Brush my teeth. Enjoy the early morning. Saddle up, and off.
I took each step in an order. I didn’t think about it. I just did it. It felt normal, good.
In retrospect, these many years later, I realize how important that routine was -- centering myself, to ward off the chaos of not knowing what was ahead.
We have this need to build environments for ourselves that help with our mental safety. When we have that, the next steps of our days become more manageable. There’s comfort in that.
Think about your daily life and the routines you use. You probably commute the exact same route to your job every day. For breakfast, I imagine you choose a similar dish each morning. You probably eat lunch and dinner around the same time. You go to sleep regularly at an appointed hour.
Some routines are simple and make sense. You get used to eating certain foods and at certain times, so that becomes your standard. They give you stability – you don’t have to think about creating a new dish, shopping for all the ingredients and flipping the pages in a cookbook to bake something unique.
You can get stuck in routines though, good or bad. Rather than branching out or challenging yourself, you fall into a rut. That’s often when we commit to change.
Trigger points for me certainly come at those times where boredom sets in or I realize something isn’t going right in my life. Then it’s time to examine the circumstances and recognize that eating fistfuls of M&Ms is contributing to my tight belt.
Routines root us, provide comfort and help us navigate the day-to-day. And, sometimes you need to break them. Only you know when it’s time.
As a follow up to that, or perhaps as a corollary or response, it seems to me we often establish routines. We do this for many reasons. One, I believe, is to fight the uncertainty of what we don’t know. Or, when our world doesn’t turn out the way we thought it would. The routine helps even out our false/inaccurate projections, and gives us a sense of balance.
You have many examples in your life, I’m confident. When I bicycled close to 4,000 miles across North America in 1982, I faced the unknown. Each day was as new as it could be. I had no idea what to expect. My life was cut loose.
Not knowing the road ahead, the weather, how people driving by me would act, the terrain, I needed a rope, a security blanket. I didn’t know this at the time. I realized this later.
What happened over the four months I pedaled was that I established a routine to root myself, to make myself comfortable. It started each morning.
Waking up to the rising sun, I’d get out of my one-person tent, take the mandatory leak, and grab my water bottle, dosing myself for the hard day ahead. Food was next. Some granola, perhaps an apple or banana, and I was fortified. Take down the tent. Fold the sleeping bag. Pack them both on the back of the bicycle. Brush my teeth. Enjoy the early morning. Saddle up, and off.
I took each step in an order. I didn’t think about it. I just did it. It felt normal, good.
In retrospect, these many years later, I realize how important that routine was -- centering myself, to ward off the chaos of not knowing what was ahead.
We have this need to build environments for ourselves that help with our mental safety. When we have that, the next steps of our days become more manageable. There’s comfort in that.
Think about your daily life and the routines you use. You probably commute the exact same route to your job every day. For breakfast, I imagine you choose a similar dish each morning. You probably eat lunch and dinner around the same time. You go to sleep regularly at an appointed hour.
Some routines are simple and make sense. You get used to eating certain foods and at certain times, so that becomes your standard. They give you stability – you don’t have to think about creating a new dish, shopping for all the ingredients and flipping the pages in a cookbook to bake something unique.
You can get stuck in routines though, good or bad. Rather than branching out or challenging yourself, you fall into a rut. That’s often when we commit to change.
Trigger points for me certainly come at those times where boredom sets in or I realize something isn’t going right in my life. Then it’s time to examine the circumstances and recognize that eating fistfuls of M&Ms is contributing to my tight belt.
Routines root us, provide comfort and help us navigate the day-to-day. And, sometimes you need to break them. Only you know when it’s time.