At the beginning of this year, I mused about the life of endless routine that the pandemic had brought me. Now, six months on, I’m extremely fortunate that this routine is all the pandemic’s brought me. And yet I spent much of the past year with that edgy feeling that I was wasting time – a non-renewable and fast-dwindling resource – and that life was passing me by. So I actively sought to break the routine, to introduce novelty into my life in an attempt to slow down the subjective passage of time.
Did it work? Well, up to a point.
I was very productive on some fronts. I made quite a few changes for the better, and I invested in myself and my writing. And yet there was a lingering feeling of regret. A feeling that I’m missing out. That I’m not doing all I can. That I’m slacking when it would be better to hustle, and that I’m spinning my wheels when it would be better to relax.
And yet, the pandemic’s also caused me to rethink a lot of the things in life that I took for granted. It’s made me question my assumptions about who I am and what I value. It’s given me clarity in many ways, and shattered some dearly-held illusions. It’s made me see some things – and some people, too – in a different light. And it’s changed some priorities and solidified others. In a way, the pandemic hit the “pause” button for me. The “stop and think” button, and that in itself has been valuable.
Where before I had lived for the highlights and coasted in between, I’ve come to appreciate the in-betweens. The time when nothing much is happening and nothing much changes. When routine keeps you in your comfort zone and you can relax into that comfort zone. This new appreciation of the quotidian lets me cherish new experiences all the more.
I’m currently working remotely. Not just from home, though, but from 2,500 miles away from home. It’s the first big change in my routine in more than a year. It’s broken me out of the rut, and it’s been wonderful. I’m gaining new perspectives and ideas, and the comfort zone that had been shrinking for nearly a year is expanding again. It’s a good place to be. A place of change.
Now that I’ve been on the road for two months, though, I notice that some things have become routine again. The speed of this happening surprised me, but on second thought it’s a natural process. A good thing. It gives the mind and body a chance to rest. It lowers the number of decisions to be made. The amount of input. Constant change would be as unsettling as neverending sameness would be stifling.
So the challenge now is to find a balance between routine and change. Not a stable balance, of course. Stasis, like perfection, doesn’t exist. No, the pendulum will always swing in one direction or the other. The art is to reverse its momentum at the right point in time, but the most important thing is to keep it moving.