Tenet 9: Build a Routine Around Focus

Sleep. Allot time for creation. Write. Consume. Balance. Routine, but not too much routine. Or importance of variation within the routine. Refine and enhance your routine.

Ritual

Balancing your routine

Routine is hard for me. Some people have no difficulty with it. It’s their neutral state perhaps. But me, I need to have unique experiences and mix things up day to day or I go mad. Even if I’m trapped inside, that means reading new material or working on a new project. It’s a natural pressure that I have to try new things and perhaps a boredom of the mundane rituals of life.

But there’s a tension there, because, in order to be creative in a meaningful way, in order to be ‘productive’ in a very known human sense, we need ritual. We need routine. If you reflect on your life, I am sure you can find a time that you spent consistent effort for consistent hours on something. On anything. If you haven’t, you gotta try it. It will change your life. This routine is powerful. Its why the corporate world wants you to show up 6 days a week for x amount of hours. Repetitive action leads to results over time.

The math works out to be, typically, exponential. You show up to practice every day and you improve in minute ways. After all the baseline minutia are excellent, you combine those skills. Before you a know it, you are combining skills in advanced ways and are able to do things that you never could do before. But this takes time. And every day that you don’t show up to practice (caveat: why does no one talk about the importance of rest days??) is a day wasted. Thus, the importance of routine.

But this tenet isn’t titled ‘how to develop the perfect routine’. of course, that’s a worthy goal. For me though, I prefer balance over a perfect routine. For me, when I screw up my routine and sleep in late because I got focused on something important the night before, I don’t want the negativity surrounding a broken routine to become the focal point of my morning. It quickly becomes the focus if you let it. I feel terrible about myself and wallow in self-loathing for a bit while my writing, if I do nay that morning at all, suffers. I become the focus, not the writing. Not the work. It’s more important to do the work daily than it is to do it at 7am every day. Some people may tell you otherwise. What is really important though, is that you find what works for you. When something works for you, you stick to it. You do it. You have to let the schedule or routine be accessible to you or you can never achieve it.

It is a battle of knowing the self and treating yourself with respect and understanding. Some people are quite hard on themselves. They use ‘discipline’ as a means to force themselves into routine. I actually love discipline, don’t get me wrong. It is the force that I leverage to get writing or working every day. Sometimes though, discipline can be rough around the edges. It doesn’t have to be that way. I hope that Im not coming off as a big softy because you have to have a baseline expectation for yourself. You just do. You have to push yourself if you want to end up with anything. I just want you to achieve balance. Sometimes discipline- getting up at 4am every day to throw weights around 0 though admirable, can put such restrictions on yourself that you don’t feel free to sit and watch the sunrise. Still, others find their true freedom within the ritual itself. You have to know yourself in order to find balance.

My ritual is a paradox.it changes often. There are always constants though, but the overarching plot is up for experimentation. Experimentation is the constant. This is partially because 1. My life is my laboratory, and 2. I am intentionally exposing myself to new and interesting routines and practices that I want to try out.

So I live in an ever shifting landscape of ritual and chaos. But I I find myself in balance that way. Which leads us right to a very important question… what is balance?

Like all good tightrope walkers know, there is no balance without tension. You have all of these things – emotions, thoughts, feelings, social forces, pressures- pulling you from the one side. If you cave into these pressures you will be dragged about. You need resistance in the opposite direction, of equal force so as to not be pulled the opposite way. So, as normal human beings, how do you summon these mystical forces in your life?

Gotcha! There’s nothing mystical about it. Often, the forces pulling one way are external pressure from others and things like social fears, financial restrictions. Health issues. The other direction is how you respond to these external pressures. Your attitude and your mental disposition make up the internal forces that are under your control and that resist the yanking of the external influences. These are how you achieve balance. You manipulate the external things that you can control, but oyu must be mindful that there is much in the external realm that you cannot control. So you must compensate with the only thing left – your internal self. With your mind.

So how does this translate into the subject of finding balance in a routine? You have to remember what the purpose of the routine is. You have to have the routine serve you. One important example is your health. Doing exercise and eating well should be staples of your routine that serve you by making you stronger. How does your routine serve your creative life? You have to decide how it should serve you and make it so. Do not be subservient to your routine. Do not become complacent with the ease of repetition. Be active – be mindful. Build an awareness of the routine into your routine. This will help you both appreciate the routine more and keep your from getting lost in the rituals of daily life.

This is how balance happens. You must become aware of the forces at work in your life. Time- where it goes. I think of time only so much as I have to. I break it into 24- or 12-hour intervals when it comes to routine. There are things I do to start and to close. There are many things that get done in between. Be mindful of these forces and be mindful of the level of tension that results do you focus too much on where your time goes that does that force then (internal) pull you out of balance? Or are you in the opposite situation? There are often many, many forces at work and perfect balance is not achievable or sustainable. But like, anything else, if you aim for perfect and fail, the result is likely to be much better than if you aim for good and fail.