Routines are funny things. They pop up in the strangest places--who reading this doesn't have a shower routine? A series of deliberate, ordered motions that gets you from dirty to clean? Love them or hate them, I think they can tell us quite a bit about the way we process the world.
Every morning when I wake up I push myself through a two-hour routine. It starts in my bedroom when I shut off my alarm and prop my eyes open with two twigs I keep on my nightstand. Eyes successfully wedged open, I spend anywhere from five to thirty minutes waking up to the Internet: what happened on facebook while I was sleeping? Any new sales at Banana Republic? Any essential emails arrive? Then, before I leave bed, I tap on my iPhone until I've got the local NPR station broadcasting Morning Edition. I stumble to the kitchen. Once there, I blindly ricochet around until I have a cup of coffee. The morning continues that way, through a series of "getting ready" motions--eat breakfast, more coffee while enjoying the morning air on the porch, shower, shave, iron, get dressed, fill water bottle. By 7:30 or so I'm awake and ready to go to work.
Once at work my routine is less ordered. The only unchanging part of my days are the scheduled teaching times. Apart from those, I operate via a system of post-it notes affixed to my desk. I usually have three lined up in a row, each in various states of crossed-offedness. Each three inch square has a long list of tasks--"Photocopy Malcolm X handout," "Grade Comp I F ICW," "Upload CM 121 A grades to online database." When I'm not doing last-minute course prep, I work through those lists. I take lunch around 11:15, teach again in the afternoon, use the open hours at the end of the day to make sure I'm not in trouble for the next day. Then I go home.
Up until this point, my day has been fairly structured. I've had a set task or a general end point in mind the entire day. And it usually doesn't hit me that that is gone until I pull into long, uphill driveway for my apartment building. I grab my bag, climb up the stairs, remove my tie and shoes, spend a few minutes scratching the white cat so she will stop meowing, and find myself thinking Well now what do I do? There is always dinner to cook, usually some dishes to wash. Might be laundry I could do. But there isn't a set schedule, not even an end point to keep in mind. And that, as I have recently realized, is a problem for me.
It feels like I didn't used to have this problem. When I was a kid, I loved summer vacation. No school meant the freedom to go anywhere--in my mind. I spent hours building elaborate houses with blocks and skyscrapers with K-Nex sets. I drew floor plans and cross section drawings of houses, buildings, and ships. And once the buildings and drawings were complete, I would spend twice as much time imagining worlds inside of those spaces, inventing families, relationships, disasters, all the basic plot points of a good story. I made miniature movies in my head. Once I got going, you couldn't stop me. Every morning I would wake up, eat the breakfast my mom had set aside for me in the fridge, turn on the Discovery channel, and start in on my projects. After dinner I switched the TV to Nick at Night and did the same activities to Bewitched and I Love Lucy. And then I went to bed.
As it turns out, in designing spaces and filling them with people, I was practicing for one of two careers: architect, which I rejected after one semester at University of Illinois, or englishy person, which I am currently pursuing. Without knowing where it would all end up or if any of it had a purpose, I would get up and practice those arts diligently. And I was happy because I was living deliberately every day. I was living deliberately and I didn't even know it.
But life has changed since I was a child. Before I even knew what it was I had lost the innate ability to conjure deliberate life without thinking. Sometimes I think that my particular generation--those of us who are twenty-somethings right this second--lived through one of the most dramatic changes in they way our society interprets and promotes being human. We will be the last generation to remember what it was like to live in a completely different world.
When I was eight years old, there was no Internet to speak of. We were still using outdated Apple computers in the one computer lab at my elementary school. My dad had a computer at home that ran DOS--I remember memorizing command lines to open up Mario Paint, but that's all it did for me. It didn't reach out. Somewhere along the line, Internet came into the home, along with AOL Instant Messenger. Soon, face-to-face conversations were dominated with comparisons of our online lives--"How many friends do you have on AIM?" became common conversation on the bus. Then it was reality television and a twenty-four hour news cycle. Somewhere in there I replaced my drawing and building routines with Internet design. I learned graphic design, HTML coding, and got really, really excited when I discovered CSS. Life started to move very, very quickly. Via the Internet, I was exercising the deepest levels of my creativity in a place with no closing time and no geographic borders. There was also no alone time--I started communicating with other young web developers around the world. By the time I was sixteen I had a parent-sponsored cell phone and was a texting genius. The lines of life became blurred--there was almost no place I was expending energy that wasn't connected to the big, outside world, no place where I could "turn off" the public side of me. Then there were cars and part-time jobs and being over-involved at school. Then there were college applications, and MySpace pages and Xanga blogs to update. Then I was off at college and facebook arrived during the first semester of my freshman year. In ten years, there was a monumental shift from a slow-paced, independent life to fast-paced, digital, interdependent, twenty-four hour lifestyle. The danger there is that I never disconnected long enough to relax and return to me. I learned to never leave the outside world. When friends have access to what I think while cooking dinner and getting ready for bed, when am I just being me? When am I cultivating me?
When I am at work I am outgoing, I am industrious; I am full of energy, even when I am held back by a cold. But when I am home, without a routine, without any definite goals, I sometimes turn into a different person. I can be discontent, easily annoyed, even despondent. I check facebook and Twitter every ten minutes. I often end up watching TV while simultaneously playing games on my cell phone, paying little attention to either task while I grow annoyed at my inability to focus on two different things at once. I don't feel whole or fulfilled.
Today was different though. I woke up well-rested and fully conscious that I had one more day off from work. When I stepped outside I was greeted by the first crisp, fall-is-coming day. I love this weather, when the air is crisp and clean. It's invigorating. Filled with such positivity, I thought about what to do with my day. Self, I said, what would you like to do today? Well, you could do laundry but it's much too nice a day to spoil with two hours of laundry before noon. You could find a show to watch, or you could read. Oh, oh, oh! Why don't you make a little nest on the couch and settle in for a movie? Now that, that is a good idea.
And so I did. I grabbed a pillow and a blanket, I loaded a Meryl Streep movie (Heartburn ) and settled in. But then I realized that my little nest was also a fantastic reading pace. So I grabbed my book (What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell) and I read. And as I read I got an idea for an academic article about student involvement that relates to technology overload and realized that I could also turn my nest into a workspace so I grabbed a journal and made some notes. And then it hit me. How strange, I thought, that all of my positive energy is feeding off itself and creating this giant clusterstorm of productivity and positivity. This feels an awful lot like when I was a kid, working but working on my own stuff. Huh, that's what Beth Capo said that one time at lunch when I accused her of being a robot--"You want to be working, but working on your own stuff."
Working, but working on my own stuff. Well that's...simple. But it's a lesson that I often forget. And I don't think I'm alone. To various degrees, we are all living in a society that is quick, shallow, and digital. It's based on microbits (or something) zipping along fiber optic lines. It's intangible. And so often it isn't real. I caught about fifteen minutes of an interview on NPR today--Shirley Turkle talking about her new book Alone Together. I haven't read it, but it's on my list. For now, her conversation had me thinking about the interdependence of the internet and how it shows up in life. At one point she said, "we think that because we grew up with the internet that it must be all grown up and it's just not." Applied to my experiences with the internet and general modern distractions from a recognition of, well, me, her message is that I/we am/are often lost in a big, interconnected, crazy way of life that we accepted before we knew the repercussions it would bring.
I don't know it means for culture at large but I'm pretty sure, for me, I'm going to be deliberately working on living deliberately, on activities that cultivate me. I'm going to stay busy by working but working on my own stuff. And that might involve the Internet, as long as it is deliberate. As long as I'm not escaping me in the process.
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