{"id":639,"date":"2017-06-01T09:26:58","date_gmt":"2017-06-01T09:26:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/excrcl.com\/?p=639"},"modified":"2017-06-01T09:26:58","modified_gmt":"2017-06-01T09:26:58","slug":"same-old-same-old","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/excrcl.com\/?p=639","title":{"rendered":"Same Old, Same Old"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve struggled for some time now over my perception of routine. Every time I start getting stuck into a fixed schedule, I find myself growing resentful of it and wishing I were doing something more flexible. Then I’ll break the routine even for a short period and find myself craving consistency once more. It happened just in the past week.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

After two months of being back at school, I found myself itching.\u00a0Monday and Tuesday meant shifts at the climbing gym; Wednesday, a drum lesson; Thursday, layout for the school paper all afternoon and evening; Friday, a newspaper section meeting and going to the downtown climbing gym.<\/span> Even weekends, supposedly free, were structured – one day for work, the other for outdoor activity. And then of course irritating meetings, errands, and other obligations would overlay that basic routine. I became exhausted, running myself into the ground as I walked the same paths week after week.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Then at last, summer break arrived. I almost immediately embarked on nearly two weeks of travel, visiting friends and family in Colorado and California. It was incredibly refreshing to no longer have a fixed agenda; to simply go with the flow, catch up with loved ones, and see new spaces relaxed me. I began to appreciate that by selfishly breaking my own routine, these people were also breaking their routines for me voluntarily. When I consider this, I realize that I cannot say I do the same so easily; as much as I may grow to resent my routines, I also become annoyed and at times distressed when unanticipated things break them. Mixing things up feels better on my own terms.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I suppose that’s just another thing I personally need to work on. But it holds true; now home, I feel relieved. 3 flights, a sketchy Greyhound bus ride, a ferry ride, an Uber and countless car rides in between later, I am grateful to be getting back into a rhythm and having an agenda at home. I’m inherently a routine person. I like structure. I like consistency. I’m just also picky about that structure and consistency; they become intolerable if they go on for too long. I’d like to think that a good deal of other people feel this way. At the very least, I go to a school where classes changes every three and a half weeks. Surely some of my peers appreciate, as I do, that our individual school routines change in some fundamental ways every month.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Routine is not necessarily a bad thing, just as breaking routine is not necessarily worth stressing over. Balance between the two, like most things, is necessary. But beyond that, what’s necessary is not letting oneself become resentful over routine – so long as one can rest assured that it will change or be broken in the future.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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I’ve struggled for some time now over my perception of routine. Every time I start getting stuck into a fixed schedule, I find myself growing resentful of it and wishing I were doing something more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ponderings"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/excrcl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/excrcl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/excrcl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/excrcl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/excrcl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=639"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/excrcl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2381,"href":"https:\/\/excrcl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639\/revisions\/2381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/excrcl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/excrcl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/excrcl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}