Routine
is disguised ritual
ROUTINE
is the way we worship fully at the altar of the timeless. Routine is the way we step down from what is absolutely extraordinary into the miracle of an ordinary day and an ordinary hour. Routine is disguised ritual.
Routine is not the routine word it has come, so routinely, to sound. Routine is how we disguise our rituals of attentiveness: and like all rituals, routines are a way of enriching our relationship to a puzzling and sometimes overwhelming world or keeping that same fierce world at bay. I drink my coffee at the same time by the same window every morning to appreciate the tiny miraculous nature of its taste or contemplate the extraordinary nature of my changing daily realities, or I drink it feeling besieged, I drink it hurriedly, not quite ever fully present but also not wanting the ritual to end, my precious time alone about to end too soon, my own set time but a time set against the world’s besieging time. Routine as defence against reality becomes my own self constructed temporary prison cell, repeatedly visited, until made permanent: a place where I go to close the door and lock it from the inside, my precious quiet, my only way of keeping the world at bay. Routine as protection and defence always feels merciful and protective to begin with, while slowly, over time, narrowing our character and our sense of possibility, all the while closing down our freer relationship with time itself.
Routine, as an open doorway to a future life, might actually, at its best, be the ritual of deepening our relationship with time itself, of enriching our appreciation of life and the delightful details and absurdities of everyday existence. Routine can be a way of forming intimate bonds with time itself: through the quiet, meticulous making of our morning coffee or the brewing of our tea; through drinking that welcome brew in the same chair, at the same time, looking out through the very same window, but at a different daily, changing sky, seeing the world move through the seasons and all the while placing ourselves, without moving, without any apparent outside change, in the midst of the eternal and the untrammelled, our seeming unmoving routine, at the frontier of all the changes occurring in our very moveable world.
At its very best, routine is a central pillar of an inquisitive life, a consciously performed ritual, a living, repeated invitation: a way of constantly creating and deepening possibilities, and of actually getting something done over time. Routine that carries the timeless and the exploratory, can become the central foundation of keeping a relationship alive, of writing a book, raising a family, building a house. We make a miracle out of simply turning up, at the same time to do the same good work, watching that work mature, slowly, with our daily visitations, into something we could not fully imagine, before we gave ourselves over to that daily, dedicated, repeated, miraculous act of appearance and disappearance at the waiting desk or at our well-loved familiar workbench.
Routine as mere routine, can also be an empty death spiral. Routine without a living engagement with the timeless and changeable world outside of our necessary daily tasks always turns into dark unconscious magic: it is routine as the casting of repeated spells upon our own senses; to dull them and thus unconsciously lose an edge which has become too sharp and too painful for us to wield. As defences and insulation, our routines become daily incantations meant to damp down our faculties and to keep the world at bay. Routine becomes a ritual mode of defence: the hope being that if we can immobilise our self we can immobilise the unforgiving incomprehensible world around us. The worst and most damaging routines might be the repeated things we say to ourselves about the impossibility of any other life than this life, than this routine, which we then repeat routinely to a bored world, a world which unfortunately, has heard it all before and which is glad to turn away from our cynicism.
Routines, used as cover, over a sustained time can kill our creativity: the immediate morning refuge in our screens an addictive invitation to doom-scroll through news that carries nothing except the corroboration of our hopelessness, looking endlessly for messages that in the end carry nothing of what we really wish to hear. Routines can become a way of locking ourselves in place, the addiction to continually breaking news, the loss of anticipation for our own inner revelations, the forlorn hope for some kind of outside force that will have the strength and power to break through our inner deadlock. Routines need our attention and our observation, routines can be a matter of life and death.
-excerpt from the new essay, ‘Routine’ from Consolations II, now available at davidwhyte.com or Amazon
Routines or the illusion that we don't have routines sit at the very centre of how we voyage through the days ... many of our routines may be ones of avoidance and denial, but still, even activities which we feel waste our time are very revealing to observe and underscore and even open up the creative doorways we are deathly afraid of approaching. DW
The memory of that coffee in the photograph makes my mouth water, issuing as it did from the dark and sublime beans of Durán Barista in Granada, Spain. Durán Barista was part of my morning writing routine, The aroma of the coffee, the background hubbub of steam and morning conversation, the wooden grain of the desk and the flow of my nib on the page all combining to make a spell-like ritual out of what only looked like routine... DW