By Carl Nelson
A lot of my life is routine. This is not by accident.
It probably would be nothing but routine, if it weren’t for the paradox that it is boundaries which outline our freedoms. All sorts of freedoms are possible within a routine life, which is why I employ it. For a person who loves exploration, routine is a great time saver. Routine is life beta tested. The bicycle is not in the driveway. The coffee is already prepared and hot. The car is full of gas. The traffic is at its lightest. The wife and children are where you expect them to be. And you arrive at work ready and settled, prepared for just about anything. Because your work life has been beta tested, again and again, with all of the nits, hiccups and distractions combed out neatly and discarded like fleas. I am ready. Let’re rip! Routine prevents a life from being swallowed up by trivia and happenstance. Routine is the four lane freeway. Add minimalism and you have air travel.
People employ the word routine to describe a repeated trajectory and narrative. Often people unwittingly assume routine eats up a lot of time, when actually, a good routine frees up a lot of time. A routine is where you send all of those things which need doing, your regular maintenance. And maintenance which is done routinely often saves one from a world of trouble. Just as “it takes money to make money”, likewise “it takes time, to save time”. This is what routine acknowledges; your freedoms must be earned. Once you’ve discovered an easy time saver… save it! Place it in your maintenance folder.
Another aspect which routine implicitly employs is practice, so that you become better at something. For example, a gymnast might talk about doing her “parallel bars routine”. Why? Because this will make her performance better. Likewise, a well planned routine can make your life better. Preparing for work in the morning, or packing for travel can become like an art form.
It makes my dog’s life better. Tater loves his routine. He doesn’t understand what I am saying, or what I’m thinking. But he does remember what comes next, and he’s there to lead. This is because we honor the same routine nearly everyday. He loves knowing what to do, and then doing it next. He knows just where the treats might be. He knows when to pee and poop. He knows just by the sound of my fingers on the keyboard, or through some other incident, just when it is time to nap on the sofa. Likewise, my wife has a good notion of just where I’ll be and probably what I’ll be doing, (perhaps even thinking) by knowing my routine and glancing at the clock.
Routine also serves as an excellent memory aid. It has the mnemonic device of a task cluster. Getting up immediately clusters with, go to the washroom, brush your teeth, take your pills, then dress. In that order, each attaches to the last. It’s rather like my Dad talking about ferrying planes from South America to the Sahara and having to hit a tiny island in the Atlantic for refueling. A line of a dozen or more planes had only one navigator, him. And they carried just enough fuel to make the island. If he miscalculated and missed the landing point, they’d all be led off to die in the sea. Because they had only one navigator, each plane followed the plane ahead. The routine as a mneumonic device is much like that. One task follows the next, after rising, until we locate our destination… sitting down with brewed coffee. There I rest for a while before beginning the next routine. Like an airplane pilot, I prudently go through my checklist routine, so that I reach my office desk free of concerns and missed tasks and ready to give the work my full attention.
Routine will allow us to give more important things our full attention. Driving is a good example. Driving can be so routine that I’m often able to give the conversation with my passenger my full attention. In fact, the driving routine provides a sort of rhythmic backstop to the whole endeavor. Talking while doing a routine task for example, is often quite rewarding, or it is a pleasure like singing while you work. I used to sing as a Teamster while I worked in the vast warehouse loading furniture vans. I imagined myself like a ghandy dancer driving nails in rails or a black guy hefting those bales. Both activities, singing and work, had a rhythm to them, so as one needed more attention, I would lean on the routine nature of the second and vice versa.
We often manage several routines at once, or juggle them, like a fry cook, or a busking musician. This juggling of routines can add interest, like a counter beat. In fact, without a routine, it can become harder to create interest. Observers might think a routine monotonous, but that’s only because one doesn’t have enough in the air. Who watches one spinning plate? While a lot of routines in the air is like a musical or a symphony. Quite compelling. Think of a chef’s kitchen at rush hour with all of these workers spinning in their routines at top speed while intersecting with the others in their routines like the cogs of gears. Really, a story or a narrative of any sort begins its way as a routine only to collect a few more routines until you’ve got a real troupe. Think of War and Peace. All those players, each identified by the fingerprint routine of their thoughts and lives, turning upon each other like cogs in the gears… and what have we wrought? Great nations at odds!
I might say that routine is rhythm, and it is hard to imagine any sort of life at all which hasn’t rhythm, the ‘lub dub’ of its blood pulsing.
When people suggest that I’m stuck in a rut, I tell them that I’m 76 and have tasted a wide variety of life and by now I know pretty much just what I like. When my wife complained that I’m stuck in a rut also, I considered that and penned this poem:
WIVES POEM #108
Find Your Rut[i]
My wife , a salesperson, thinks I live in a rut.
But smart customers buy today
what has served them well previously.
A lot of people, day after day,
are doing the same – but expecting better –
whereas, I repeat my days, to repeat the pleasure.
Once I’ve had a fine week, I go back for another…
taking seconds or thirds.
Or if just a portion of my day were pleasing,
then I edit for that.
“And if I like my wife,
then I can keep my wife,”
I declare, making the wife smile, and laugh
– all suggesting that her criticism of me
might have been initially too harsh.
When I’m off flying in my head, I’ll even do some beta testing. This is called re-writing. I turn a sentence around so that the emphasis lands most precisely on the thought, like the gymnast practicing her landing. Generating a comedy routine was finding five minutes which was thoroughly beta tested; which ‘killed’ every time. You’d go over jokes, fine tuning the timing, phrasing, punch line, etc.. I’d carry a small tape recorder in my pocket so that every nuance of the audience response was studied. Some jokes could be made better. Some routines worked better rearranged with better transitions. Some jokes took the audiences’ eye off the ball. They might be effective, but not there. Some just couldn’t be sold. And some could only be sold to certain audiences.
Dating is basically beta testing with the goal of finding that ‘one’ who checks off all the blanks. Nowadays, it appears to my eyes, that the sexes are so leery of each other that they don’t even initially date. Instead, they sort of hang around each other, maybe ‘hook -up’, and then consider making a date, if things get serious enough, and either doesn’t act crazy. In short, the beta testing period has been extended. Some live their lives on Beta.
Oddly, some of your most important decisions you can’t beta test for. Living together, for example, isn’t a good beta test for marriage. It’s an avoidance of the commitment marriage is, which is a sort of determination in itself.
Adoption was another process where beta testing was not allowed. It was deemed too crushing for the child (and a bit hypocritical) to be accepted unconditionally – only to find they have failed later at something in the fine print.
We could only send letters one way to our son before his adoption from Thailand. And we never met until his adoption. (He was eleven when the process began; thirteen when it ended.) We had to surmise a lot from the materials we were offered. I sensed he had a good eye based on the outfit he wore for his promotional photo. I also intuited there is intelligence in taste. (And I was right. Also that he was a savvy customer. He said later that he had saved his money in order to buy the clothes he was photographed in.) There was no beta testing, but things turned out fine, nevertheless.
Actually, much better than fine. From my side, I imagined we’d meet some kid who wrote with sticks in the dirt. Actually, one of the first things he asked, once he had the language skills to do so, was, “Why didn’t you try to contact me on Facebook?”
“Facebook?”
He was very computer savvy, also.
