Things have been different lately. Sometimes I get so caught up in the daily routine that I forget about the beauty of the mundane. Two weeks ago I started paying close attention to the habits that I have acquired over the years. I witnessed myself performing tasks and going through a routine that I started approximately 6 years ago when I first moved to Utah (albeit, slightly evolved - for example, my dog, Brandy, has added quite a bit to my routine)
As a sort of quasi-social experiment, I decided last week to make intentional adjustments and sometimes downright omissions to the rut I have become so accustomed. I did this thinking that it would put me in a better mood. I figured my brain would treat this as a sort of “vacation from myself”. This wasn’t the case at all. I found that I was more irritable at work and throughout the day in general. As much as we complain about how stagnant our lives are, we are fundamentally dependent on the little things in our life remaining unchanged, or parallel.
I quickly ended my experiment and stopped paying as much attention to my little daily quirks. Routines are not bad. They are a required way to help us handle the big things that come up. I compare it to breathing, blinking swallowing, walking, etc. Our brain doesn’t use a big percentage of its CPU power to do these things. It works on the premise that these tasks are functioning within normal parameters, allowing us to run our word processors, media players and networking tools without any memory leaks or server overloads.