Routine.
It’s a funny thing. One moment it’s the most important thing you
have, it gives you security, reliability, a vastly decreased chance
that anything scary, new or unexpected will show up, force you to
look at yourself and question where you are and why. The next moment
it’s the only thing wrong with your world, it’s holding you back.
If you could just shake it somehow. Routine is both your friend and
that guy from school who’d never physically damage you, but who
somehow made you feel like the most worthless thing alive. Though
that may not apply to everyone. So routine is a fucker, is basically
what I’m saying. That should be enough to encourage us to break it,
but we don’t because of that safety net and eventually we get stuck
in one, eventually you get stuck in one. Eventually, I’ll get stuck
in one. So like I say. A fucker.
It’s
got to be why we exist so often in fiction. In stories, in slightly
altered memories, in our own imaginings of other peoples dramas, in
cinema. A conjured, slightly alternate now that exhibits some of the
actions we could’ve made if we didn’t have to do the thing we
always do, because, well, that’s what we always do. You can watch a
film and it will stir an emotion, a feeling, an excitement or
anticipation that we probably haven’t felt for real since
childhood, since before we were shown what the norm is. If we ever
felt it at all. The heart flutters, your blood flows faster than
before. The moment you close the book or leave the theatre,
everything feels more real than it has before, because that alternate
reality reminds you that they exist, that there are alternatives.
Then, by the time you turn the key in the front door, it’s gone.
Somewhere along the way, risk and reward has been squeezed out by
tradition and consistency.
Consistency.
I highly value it, in a person it is a valuable commodity, but like
honesty it is only as it is received. In other words, your consistent
failure as witnessed by others may be your personal, single greatest
triumph, much as your well intended honesty is anothers brutal,
cutting insult. There’s no point being reliable if you’re
reliably repugnant. Of course, only you get to decide whose version
of events is most tenable. Are you right to conduct yourself in that
manner, or is it the way those actions are perceived that speaks most
of their value. It’s both. I know, sorry, but it is. You have to
share head space with you for ever, which is a really long time, so
you’ve got to be most at peace with the things you do and way you
operate, but those operations need to be, at the very least, informed
by the general response of the people they involve. That delicate
balance – between measured, informed consistency and Hollywood,
caution to the wind, adrenaline fuelling risk – is key to the
problem of routine.
You
can trade the potential riches of unlikely choice for the comfortable
embrace of the expected, and one could argue that the expected is a
preferable route, but it does make it tempting to slightly under
achieve – to function within known parameters – in order to avoid
the disappointment of aiming for the bullseye and hitting Mental
Bastard Bill on the other side of lifes pub. Which brings us back to
routine, which we established earlier, is a fucker. When our routine
feels stagnant and restrictive, we have a tendency to blame the film
or the book or the stories for a feeling of inferiority, of boredom
and failure, for the feeling of dissatisfaction that may present
itself from time to time. They fill us with false hope, they show us
a better way that can never really be, they fill our heads with
silly, unhelpful notions like hope and dreams, possibility and time
travel. Ok, so time travel’s not relevant here. But they are one of
the few remaining threads that connect us to a maybe. It’s the
‘what ifs’ that are important, not the ‘what am I doings’,
because ‘what am I doing’ is a stupid question. You’re doing it
already, just look down. If you have to ask what you’re doing, you
either haven’t been thinking hard enough before doing it, or you
haven’t been paying attention. Or you’re lying to yourself to
save face.
I
suspect there’s an element of shame because, in a way, routine is
an addiction. Like cigarettes, like alcohol, like laughter or crying
or cake or pornography or shoes or murdering. We use it to control
and define, internally and as a society. What is needed is to become
functioning addicts, to bend the habit with force until it fits
around how you want to be. A bottle in your bottom drawer at work, a
stash of chocolate under the bed, a spotless clean up and a really
good place to hide the bodies. The trick, presumably, is finding
something that you want to do over and over again, and keeping it
that way. To repeatedly do something, something new, something you
wanted to but never did. To make your own routine, instead of bending
yourself to fit in with someone else’s. I’m pretty sure that at
some point you die, and I’m fairly certain that just before that
point there will be little pride gleaned from a past spent
efficiently filing or flipping a really average burger, particularly
if the entire time was spent wondering about that thing you’d like
a pop at.
All
of this may well just be the over stimulated ramblings of a man
bubbling with the rose tinted hope and possibility that only a
weekend of too little sleep and too many movies watched can cause,
but I think it makes some sort of sense. Anyway, I’m going to watch
another one and then, before my desire to be and do better than this
fades, I’ve got some projects to work on. Then another film. The
effect only lasts so long.
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