Routine (part 1--Boredom)

(Be sure to read part 2 immediately after part 1 below.)

One of my favorite Simpson's quotes is something Homer said to Marge in that soft, patronizing voice of his, and I have to paraphrase here:

"Marge, our marriage is founded on a solid basis of ROUTINE."

I don’t think more comforting, nor truer, words were ever spoken in a sitcom.

Routine. What a powerful word. What a powerful concept. Sometimes I think we don’t appreciate the life-shaping impact of routine.

In one of my more lugubrious periods some years ago, I happened upon a wonderful book by Harvey Oxenhorn, Tuning the Rig. He says this:

"Routine: derived from ‘route,’ a line of pilgrimage or travel. How widely must one travel, and how far afield, to discover the value of that word? No matter. To believe in your journey is to have already arrived. And to surrender to the long haul, willingly, is to take it and make it your own."

Sometimes we get bored with what we are doing. At other times so much is going on we are overwhelmed by it all. As I look at the goofiness of my life, I see two possibilities when I’m either bored or overwhelmed.

First, when I’m bored, I haven’t clearly fixed in my mind where I’m going; I have no journey to believe in. My days are filled with sameness, with routine. So what? Of course my routine is going to get boring if I have nowhere to go, no purpose behind it all.

Some years ago I worked for a large technical silk screening company. I don’t know how many of you have ever done silk screening by hand before. It can be incredibly monotonous. Because this was a commercial operation we often had huge runs to print, even the ones that were done by hand and not on the big automated machinery in the plant.

I put the monotony--the routine--to good use (at first quite unintentionally, I might add). Silk screening by hand is a constant, rhythmic flow of sliding the material to be printed in place, lowering the screen, pulling a squeegee through the ink, flooding the screen with ink, lifting the screen, placing the printed material on the dryer, and repeat, and repeat, and repeat--thousands of times a day, job after job. Yuck, how boring.

To take the edge off the apparent boredom, I listened to music on my Walkman. I had a friend, Dan, who was very big into music. Had I been left only to my own musical tastes, I probably would have listened to The Beatles all the time. That couldn’t possibly be bad, could it? But because of Dan, who supplied me with cassette tapes of all kinds of music, my horizons expanded exponentially. I discovered that there was more in the world of music than what resided in my limited repertoire of musical tastes. Buddy Guy, Janis Joplin, Elvis Costello, Julia Fordham, Nick Lowe, and, yes, even Frank Zappa ended up on my play list. And because I listened to an ever larger circle of musical styles, my own life of music expanded. I went to more concerts, played more guitar, and surrounded myself with more music than ever before. All that because I had my mind freed up by a heapin’, helpin’ daily dose of predictable routine. Music became my journey to believe in, and silk screen printing became the routine that carried me on that journey. That expanded world of music remains to this day something that brings me a great deal of joy.

More next time about those times when we are overwhelmed and their relationship to routine.