Routines... Comfort Food for the Soul

So often, I have felt boxed in by my routine. It sometimes becomes soul deadening. I can begin to feel like I am trapped... a prisoner to a fixed schedule, and all I want to do is to bust out of it and to just do something different and new.

But the "routine" can be a good thing. My life is not always in balance. Sometimes events and circumstances spin completely out of control. Let's face it. Life can get messy from time to time and when that happens, I find comfort in my established routines at work or at home. I can find certainty and predictability and a sure sense of where I need to be at a certain time. There is a certainty about what should be happening and what I should be doing. If I do not always control every aspect of my routine, at least I need to know what to expect.

My life becomes difficult to maneuver when the routine changes or falls apart. That is how things are for me now. Suddenly I have time on my hands again and now I must decide how to restructure my days and how to once more make productive use of my time. I am drifting from one moment to the next, from one day to the next.

So now the task before me is to rebuild my life yet one more time. It is not that putting some kind of structure back into my life is an especially difficult thing to do. For me, the challenge is to get past the mental malaise and get myself focused once again on what I have to accomplish next. And then I have to make a plan and take that first step in carrying out the plan. Probably the hardest part of this process is getting past just thinking about what needs to be done. Making the decision to act is the toughest thing to do. Once I have done that, the rest is easy.

So I pretty much know that I need to seriously go out and build my business, so I can pay the bills. Time to pull out the calendar, set a date and time to get moving and get a good night's sleep the night before, so that I will be wide-awake and very sharp that day. And on that day, things will fall back into place for me. I will have a new routine to provide the structure for my life and to give me a reason to get up each morning.

Nothing is all good or all bad. In fact, about the only thing we really need to do if our routines become a little too predictable or a bit stale is to change them up just a little. Or maybe all it takes is to occasionally do something different, like eat out or go to the movies or get out of town for a few days.

The way I see it, I am damned if I have structure in my life and damned if I don't. I prefer the former case, because with a structured life, I am like that fellow who is out shopping, who finds himself standing in front of the map of the mall. Somewhere on that map is that small label with an arrow that states, "You are here." Even though I may complain about my routine, from time to time, at least, at any particular moment, I know where I should be, what I need to be doing and why I should be doing that particular thing.