Routine Matters

So much of our time is spent on routines, doing the same things over and over, day after day.

With repetition comes habituation. After performing the same actions enough times, we get to a point where we don't really have to think about what we are doing, we go on automatic pilot. This is the whole point of an athlete practicing their skills, in an effort to commit them to "muscle memory", to sharpen their reactions to a point where they become almost subconcious.

But habits can be a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it does facilitate the performance of repetitive tasks, reducing them to a series of simple, well-worn steps. This allows us to accomplish mundane tasks with a minimum of effort. It gives us a sense of security in knowing that we have the day-to-day aspects of our life under control.

These seemingly positive aspects of our routines become negatives after long use. The rote following of a learned behavior means that behavior is no longer being examined in the light of new information or methods. When an approach to a problem appears to function well in one instance, the tendency is to apply that methodology to any apparently similar problem. "Why re-invent the wheel?" is a legitimate question if everything in your life has wheels. However, for the majority of us, our lives are not that uniform.

More importantly, attempting to place the events in our lives under the broad category of the routine robs us of the opportunity to experience the new, the unique, or the unexpected encounters that are part and parcel of being alive. We lose our sense of wonder and awe. Life becomes dull, and monochromatic. Anything that refuses to neatly fit into our pre-existing categories of experience is ignored or discarded as an irrelevant outlier.

Life is fleetingly temporary; the goal is not to get through it as rapidly and efficiently as possible, but rather to embrace its diversity and hidden beauty. Life is not a routine matter, it is an extraordinary opportunity.