The Power of Routine: Striking a Balance in Your Life
Good morning friends.
Usually I spend some of the weekends thinking of something to share.
I find something provocative to reflect on. I enjoy the community of sharing and occasionally receiving responses. Often I re-purpose the materials I create, send them to my email list, record them as a short podcast, and/or publish them on Medium and my blog.
Of course, part of my motivation is 'business-related'. Like many of us, I earn what little I earn by providing things people want. If people don’t know what I provide, how can they know if they want it?
Also, like many of us I suspect, 'promotional' work - 'selling' - doesn’t come easily to me and I'm often reluctant.
I’d rather go for a walk. I’d rather write some music. I’d rather read something, draw something, eat something.....
Does this sound familiar to you?
(Of course there's days I’d rather doom-scroll Facebook, sulk or feel sorry for myself)
This last weekend, 'life' got in the way.
Did it? Is that an excuse I’m making?
I could have written something, but it would have been at the expense of something else. I guess I made a choice.
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There is Always a Balance to be Struck
Two things seem true.
Routine is Important
If you want to travel a journey, take one step after another in the direction you want to go. Let taking steps become your routine. Taking one step in one direction, then stopping, then going in another direction leads nowhere. One of the things I often say to people when I train or mentor them is this: "if you do the work you’ll get a result. You don’t always know what the result will be, but if you commit to regular work, you'll get a result."
The flipside of that is - if you don’t do the work, you won’t get ANY result. Faced with reluctance, overload or other blockage, let routine take you back to your work.
Except...
Routine can be a Prison Cell
Mindlessly to do your work without investment of attention or love, is simply a mechanical consumption of time. It’s noise without meaning. It deadens. There are times when life (inner or outer) is more urgent than the routines you live by. So be it. Sometimes you step away. When I run a long workshop or residency, I have strong routines - the same exercises/structures at the same time each day. Then the day comes when I see that everyone mindlessly expects to walk the same path as they do every day. and it’t time to do things differently.
Anyway, this weekend life got in the way. I didn’t make time to create 'content' for you.
But then, oh irony of ironies! Knowing I’d broken my routine I decided to compose a short email to acknowledge it… and found 'content' emerging.
That’s the thing about routine - it serves you even when you don’t honour it. If you submit to the discipline of regularity, when you step off the path, the path waits for your return.
When I write of routine, I’m writing of practice.
Whether it's a training practice, a meditative or movement practice, a creative practice, a communicative practice or any other regular commitment, if you honour it with regular attention it will serve you when your resolve weakens.
So respect and commit to your routines and practices.
Obsessively to do so is to inhabit a prison-cell of mindless habit. To ditch routines at the first stirrings of reluctance or distraction is to be a dilettante. Between those extremes lies a path that leads somewhere only you can go.
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