The Richness of Routines

I’m relearning how to brush my teeth. It’s not that I have bad technique; the brush is electric and, if I move it around to the right sections of my mouth, it does a pretty good job. What I’m working on is something more important than technique – attitude. Perspective. Put simply, my mental mindset for tooth brushing is poor. I find the twice daily ritual boring. It has become a chore.

My days have so much repetition. Wake up to the cat’s meow to be fed. Ignore the cat. Wake up again to the cat. Ignore the cat, again, and then realize that the cat always wins. Sit up. Swing feet over the edge of the bed. Put on socks. Put on a fleece jacket. Descend the stairs. Feed the cat.

Long before it’s time to brush my teeth, there are dozens of things that I do, in the same order, and usually in the same way, day in and day out. I do these things without thinking. I do these things trying to do them without thinking. Much of the day is rerun. Realizing that I lead a life of reruns can make me feel small and insignificant.

Maybe you can sympathize. Most of us have parts of our day, or parts of our week, that are the same. It’s late at night and here I am – again – brushing my teeth. It’s Tuesday and here I am – again – taking the trash down to the end of the driveway. I’ve been brushing my teeth since I can remember. I’ve been taking the trash out on Tuesday nights since I was a kid. Will I always have to do this? Won’t I ever break through to something new?

Biology demands repetition. Rhythms of social life reinforce that demand. Such reoccurrence can leave our psyches exposed to the mindlessness of reiterated action and activity. Human psychology can be comforted by the familiar for only so long before it is repulsed by the tyranny of sameness. It craves inconstancy. It covets change. The absence of novelty can lead us to annoyance or anxiety. It can lead to an unhappy state of stagnancy. We can feel stuck.

Our spirits can help. But we have to let them.

For example: I can brush my teeth with renewed concentration and focus. I can learn to bring awareness to where the brush is buzzing, what teeth need attention, how much time is spent in this or that oral quadrant. That’s fine. That’s good. However, I can improve my dental cleaning technique while also bringing a different state of presence, dare I say consciousness, to the routine. What have I learned since the last time I brushed my teeth? Did I do something today that helped the world become a better place? Am I in any sense a different person tonight than I was this morning, even in the smallest or subtlest of ways? Many of my cells are new. Am I new in any other manner?

Routines can be a gateway into the sublime. The sky can be distant and forbidding when I drag the trashcan to the driveway’s end on a wintry night. I can feel small. I can feel cold and exposed. Or I can remember looking up at the same sky when I was nine. The neighborhood was different. I was different. And yet it was still me, an earlier version of me, and the canopy above was still the March sky. Those stars are in the same place now as they were fifty years ago. Their light, however, is new, a continuous burst of nuclear fusion hurled across space and time. How fortunate we are that those stars are still burning. How lucky I am to still watch them burn.

When I let myself settle into the sublime of the similar, I sometimes experience a strange yet wonderful sense of being. Of acceptance. Even, sometimes, of joy. I can be transported across time. I can be lifted from and above myself. I can feel alive.

Routines offer a richness of experience that doesn’t need an expensive travel itinerary. They can be contacts with the eternal, inside the most mundane of moments. They are here for us, each and every today.