Habit Plays Its Sovereign Role

I end 90% of my days about 9PM sitting in this chair on the front porch of our home in Honolulu. I make make a mug of barley tea, light some incense, turn on my little book light (on the left armrest) and read fiction. Right now I am reading Richard Russo's Everybody's Fool. OMG, he is such a great writer. Recently, this late evening routine got me thinking about routines in general. I am a proverbial creature of habit and have been since I was a kid growing up on the Windward Side of O'ahu. One day, wanting to lose weight so a fellow high school girl might want to date me (in the end, she refused my ask), I went for a 3-mile run. 40 years and thousands of miles later my sinews are not up for running anymore, but I swim and/or bike everyday without fail. I get crazy in the head if I don't work out and plan to die either in the saddle of my touring bike, or out in the ocean (hopefully of natural causes, not a crash or shark attack) hopefully after I turn 100. We spend a lot of time in business and education talking about the creativity that emanates from spontaneity. I am the first to step up and say that dashing, imaginatively unafraid down that road less traveled is a good thing for the soul, but I love and am made healthy by my routines. Setting up the coffeepot the night before and measuring, to the gram, the amount of coffee each time? Check. Starting my day with a glass of cold water? Check. The daily updating of my legal pad "Get Stuff Done" quadrant map? Check. A half hour's editing and rearranging of my Apple MacBook's calendar (which is where stuff on my legal pad ends up and is arranged by date and time)? Check. Laying out my clothes and making my lunch the night before? Check. Other habits and routines? Check.

Mary Oliver in Long Life: Essays and Other Writings once wrote, “In the shapeliness of a life, habit plays its sovereign role.” I could not agree more, and in doing so I suspect I am in the very small minority. Any small bit of Internet research reveals a Niagara Falls of commentary on the evils of falling into habits and routines. But my routines are not merely dull items on a checklist that crush the spirit and reduce one to a gray shadow of humanity. My routines are guideposts and waypoints on the journey towards what I value highly: Getting stuff done. I love thinking about them, creating them and looking forward to them. Tell me the truth, reader friend, you don't derive a wonderful sense of satisfaction by setting up tomorrow's coffee pot today, just after lunch? Say is is not so! My unsolicited advice is to let go of that feeling you are stuck in a rut and embrace the sovereign role routines play in bringing calm to these tumultuous times.