The Drip, Drip, Drip of Routine

I fall easily into the loving, welcoming arms of a routine. Give me a list with a schedule, and I drift off, fading away into the comforting pattern and sparkling efficiency of auto-pilot. Are you familiar with the alluring magic of auto-pilot?

Let me tell you about the extra-spectacular results of surrendering life to auto-pilot. The worrying stops. The thinking stops. You dive from the cliff and let the rhythm of the day carry you away to a distant land, where your day-dreams encompasses you in the delicious glow of mindless existence.

Except, if I can share a darker truth with you now, the worrying doesn’t actually stop. It just builds as a dull throbbing in the background.

I have always built routines to keep myself safe, so I think I know what’s going to happen. No surprises. I won’t forget anything important and avoid disaster. And, it’s worked my whole life. Nothing bad has ever, never ever happened.

Okay, now that my laughter has stopped, and subsequent crying, let’s get on with it.

No matter what changes I’ve made in my life, I’ve clung to routines like a stubborn chow chow, refusing to let some damn human impose their eating schedule on me - and I’ve made many adjustments over the years, from changing careers to attempting to do several jobs at once. You can take my routine from my cold, dead, organized hands.

So, I carry on, jam-packing my day with all the non-negotiable daily hit parade of mundane duties. Make breakfast. Make lunch. Write. Work. Dinner, marital chit chat, more writing, trumpet, streamer catch-up, more marital chit chat, ice cream, sleep, then finally, wake up in the middle of the night and obsess about all the things I forgot to do because I was on auto-pilot.

Yes, the downside of a routine comes with all the stuff you have to remember as a responsible adult. When do you pay your bills? When do you go to the dentist? When do you get your haircut? What about taking the dog to the vet? Then you obsess on things like the new windows that never got painted because your contractor dreaded the smell of paint, because he was always waking up in a cold sweat because some rich lady haunted him for painting with the wrong shade of white. Meanwhile, the library books slowly creep under the car seat, and many miles away, something crawls from the slime, at the bottom of a dark Scottish lake.

The other key downside to routines? You fall into a day-sleep, wandering through life, completing tasks, and forgetting to breathe in the magic sights, sounds, and smells of living in this time and place.

If you’re lucky, you get to carve out one or two non-routine wins in a month. This month, that adventure came when I ventured into an unknown - a dark, strange portal known as our house crawl space.

I refused to visit this barren, perilous wasteland since moving in five years ago, mostly due to the threat of a spider army I would surely have to battle. What I found instead was a treasure trove of a-whole-lot-of-nothing, including dirt and rocks, cob webs (but no spiders?), and a newspaper from 1949. I also discovered an Eco Tech Pest Control uniform, despite any remains from an Eco Tech Pest Control specialist. So, I can only conclude the spiders devoured him, and then after such an epic human conquest, crawled off into the sunset.

I emerged from those depths a new man, ready to tackle even more adventures, which in this case was the writing, streamer catch-up, ice cream, drift off to sleep sequence, before starting all over again...