#179: Beyond routines

I’ve spent most of my life dreaming up routines that might finally stick. When I do something “good” for myself, like practice yoga or prepare a nice breakfast, I often think, I should do this every day. When I meet friends for lunch and find it energizing, I say, “We should do this every week!” During most vacations I’ve taken, I’ve spent at least a portion of my time there considering how I can return on a regular basis. It never feels like quite enough to enjoy these experiences in isolation. I need to imagine doing them over and over.

All this planning is evidence of a kind of value system. It appears I’ve deemed the routine the highest form an activity can take; the perfect, syncopated rhythm through which I might finally, properly live. Popular culture seems to agree with this view. Morning routines, writing routines, exercise routines—these are the blueprints of modern self-actualization, shared online one after another for a perpetually searching public. We study them like clues that may lead us to the correct way to be. The correct way to repeat ourselves.

For all my years of self-proselytizing, I’ve never actually been converted. I am simply not a routine sort of person. My life follows a loose schedule week-to-week, but the details are constantly changing and switching around, mixing with the detritus of other to-dos, forever failing to deliver on the reverential promise of the “writer’s routine.” I’ve never done morning pages, or speedily written a shitty first draft. I edit my sentences as I write them, like a coward!

The value proposition of the routine is that it becomes so ingrained it switches over from something you do purposely (hard) to something you do habitually (less hard). In other words, it disappears into the background, working quietly in service of your productivity without using up all your resources. This sounds useful, but I’m becoming less convinced it’s what I need, or even want. What if I don’t want my life to disappear? What if I want the opposite?

Recently, at a friend’s seder dinner, I was moved by the ritual of the meal: hearing old fables, reciting words in unison, engaging with food as metaphor. I’m not religious, but it was a relief to step out of the thrum of my everyday life and honor something bigger than me. It was whatever the opposite of being on my phone is. My first thought was to question whether I was longing for religion, or lacking true belief, something resembling religious routine. But I don’t think that’s it. I think my longing is simpler than that.

On their podcast “Poog,” comedians Kate Berlant and Jacqueline Novak often refer to secular things as “godly” and “godless.” As in: liking a friend’s Instagram, godless; running into a friend on the street, godly. I think about this bifurcation all the time. Kate and Jacqueline are forever fixated on finding a new wellness routine that might change their lives, but I think their notion of what’s sacred offers a more intriguing blueprint for how to be well, or how to orient, than any particular order of events. Maybe, similarly, in some aspects of my life where I think I’m craving more routine—around movement, for instance, or food—what I’m actually craving is something like godliness. More time spent being aware of my world, worshiping its details, as opposed to more time spent lost in a mechanized rhythm.

Perhaps the pull of the religious ritual is, for me, less in repetition and routine than in a version of their opposite: disruption. Disruption of my dull and practiced way of doing things—of eating, speaking, being. An opportunity to become aware of the world in a striking new way, like when you look up on a walk and remember that trees are alive, that every leaf that unfurled this spring was arriving not “again” but for the very first time, and how breathtaking that is, all that birth. “The basis for any approach to self-transformation is an ever-increasing awareness of reality and the shedding of illusions,” writes Erich Fromm in The Art of Being. He refers often to awakeness, to making conscious what is repressed. To not just hearing, but listening. Not just seeing, but looking, watching. You can do this anywhere, with anything. A ritual in its own right.

I once read in a parenting book that one way to deal with kids’ tantrums is to “parent with awe.” In Hunt, Gather, Parent, Michaeleen Doucleff observes the way some Inuit mothers are able to calm children by encouraging them to turn their attention toward beautiful, worldly things. I tried this once with my niece, who was cranky and agitated. I picked her up and away from the group and asked her, in a hushed voice, if she could hear the swishing trees. She looked up in wonderment, suddenly quiet. Doucleff makes the connection between this trick and one she’d learned many years ago while interviewing a neuroscientist about anger management, who had suggested, to her surprise, learning to cultivate awe. 

This week I’ve been cycling through bouts of hormonal fatigue and depression, struggling to write this newsletter, unable to string my thoughts together, let alone the sentences. In moments of peak distress, I’ve tried this same strategy on myself, rerouting my attention away from the familiar trappings of my writing routine—tense body in chair, tired eyes on screen—and toward the details I typically take for granted: the roar of a far-off airplane, the way the sunlight rests gently on my hands, the curve of my painted red desk set against my white wall. In observing these details, I feel that same reverence I felt at my friend’s dinner. Something releases in my chest. I’m awake, present, awed. It doesn’t last forever, but that’s really not the point.

My favorite article I read last week was “Beyond Grievance,” by Jewish Currents editor-in-chief Arielle Angel. Last Friday’s 15 things also included some protest coverage I liked, a breakfast recipe, a gentle new album, and more. The rec of the week was how to stay off your phone.

I’ll be taking next Sunday off from (free) Maybe Baby to tend to my mental health and make some adjustments to the newsletter. Paid content will continue!

Hope you have a nice Sunday,
Haley