I’m not a routine person. I wish I were: I fully admit that routines are the secret to success in life. But something in my personality actively militates against doing the same thing over and over again, no matter how healthy it is. This has created several problems in my life: e.g., flossing (I floss daily now; I promise, but I’m ashamed to admit how many years it took me to develop this routine).
Maybe it was the pandemic, I don’t know. But at some point this year, I got to the breaking point. Too many unstructured hours–even when I had a lot to do–were leading to bad results for my mental and physical health. It was the lack of intentionality, the sense of chaos on top of a global pandemic, that made me decide it was time to take the situation in hand.
If you’ve kept up with this blog, you know I love dance. I can’t do it myself particularly well, but I love it. And I’ve found I can work on a dance routine over and over and over again until I’m happy with it; and then I do it some more just for fun. So, I decided to try to think of my daily routine as choreography.
Every good choreography needs a motivating concept or theme, and also a rhythm, and mine was the rhythm of giving and receiving. I realized that I had been in a sort of bulimic cycle where I would put out energy until I would crash and burn and not do anything for a while. It was out of balance. I wanted to make giving and receiving energy a daily cycle or rhythm or loop or whatever you want to call it so that it was sustainable. Plus, I didn’t want to wait until I got all the “have to’s” done to have fun–because, let’s face it, that day’s never going to come. So, I decided to work in, each day, cycles of reading/learning and writing, creating and recreating, nourishing and being nourished, encouraging others and being encouraged.
I won’t go into how I worked out this choreography hour to hour because it’s kind of overly detailed, and I didn’t stick to it anyway. But, I did find that I paused more often for self-care, that I was more mindful about how I was spending my time, and that I had more of a sense of purpose. Basically, I remembered to take my vitamins and stretch. So, there’s that.
The Rookery 