The World Of Routines

I’m often struck by the relative robotic nature of my days. Some might call them ‘ruts.’ All along my life’s circuitous route there have been routines established, apparently somehow orchestrated by my exclusive DNA components.

Surely we all have our idiosyncratic ways of living. Some of us are slow in our movements, not eager to have a conversation so soon after rising from our slumber. Some of us begin talking at the breakfast table and don’t stop until sleep finally overtakes us in the dark of night. Some of us are hyper-active, have a need to go, to do, to accomplish. Some of us take on our days with a slower pace, stopping to muse, feeling no real pressure to speed up our movements. ‘ Different strokes, different folks.’ Now, of course, there are many factors that play into and affect our daily habits – jobs, children, any number of necessities – but I’m betting we stay close to some dictated rhythm within us throughout our lives.

There are workaholics among us. Some are the movers and shakers of our world. I’ve worked in life for and with workaholics, admired them, and it has been difficult to keep pace with these good people of accomplishments. There are the loafers among us. Some of these folks make schedules and timelines near impossible to keep and/or they provide ‘keystone kop’ periods in our days. There are day dreamers (not quite in the same category of ‘loafer’) who can come up occasionally with great ideas but have trouble with the nitty-gritty implementation process. There are the steady gophers who get the jobs done, do as they’re told, who make up the highest percentage of the employee ranks, and who will once in a while offer surprising insight into a particular function.

If you’re waiting for this to go to some ‘Eureka’ stage, it’s not going to happen. I’m just sitting here being my rather robotic self, doing my routine typing on the laptop, doing my routine maintenance on the social networks, and, right after lunch, maybe, just maybe, I will get some writing done on my tenth book. But here’s the thing, you can likely guess accurately to which group of robots I belong and you need to know that I’ve mingled in all the groups mentioned and I now use ‘age’ as an excuse for my slowdown in life. I’m up in the morning, not saying much to my good wife and George the cat, kind of sullen, you might say, and, after my donut and chamomile tea, I settle myself on the love seat with laptop on my lap, look out the big windows at the Sea of Cortez, and slowly decide how it is that I will interrupt someone’s day with a clever tweet utterance or handle some imagined HOA crisis or really get about the business of writing more in my tenth book. Sometime during the day the good wife and I might, might, take a walk along the beach and gather some sea glass and shells. We might have a drink before dinner, and we will definitely settle into the TV shows that have become our staples. Bedtime comes around 10:30 to 11:00 PM, and, tomorrow, I get to do it all over again – with likely some mild modifications.

So, with age and retirement, it seems to me the only good folks that are going to maybe suffer a bit in their routines will be those movers and shakers and the workaholics. Surely, they’re going to make miserable some of us in the aforementioned groups. We are who we are and there’s really room for all of us … just, no long conversations, please! I’ve got to write my posts, do my tweets, figure out this digital world, finish that tenth book, and figure out how to make my books go viral in 2013 …

We won’t get into the philosophical and metaphysical aspects of our daily occupations with time, the universe, what we might mean in the ‘big blast’ or ‘Intelligent Creation’ thing – ‘ours but to do …’ Of course, I would like to think it all means something, these wars we fight, these ugly tragedies of our lives, these politicians who make us so miserable with their sand-box silliness, our loves, our friendships  … our living.

Sometimes, maybe it’s just better to create our little routines and enjoy as much as we can until our time runs out: be creative, be boring, be active, be a couch potato, be whatever it is we are. We will likely end up at the ‘non-spiritual’ or ‘spiritual’ or ‘black void’ locations for which we were intended.

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