Routine

Image credit: Photo by Daveybot on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

My son recently did something startling. He sat down in a different seat than usual. That may not seems startling, but for years, he has had the same place. And it's not just the same seat he enjoys, sameness in general comforts him: the same cup, the same spoon, the same bowl, the same foods, the same sequence at bedtime, the same toys and games, the same words over and over. So, change, when it comes takes me by surprise.

I like to pretend that I abhor routine myself. After all, it seems dull to get up and do the same thing day after day. I'm theoretically very spontaneous, and by extension, interesting. But only in theory. In reality, I eat the same thing for breakfast every morning and the same thing for lunch each day. Every now and then it changes, but once it does, that new item will remain fixed for months. I do the household chores in a particular order, regardless of what I feel is important or what needs to be done (and that's one of the reason the litter box suffers: I always leave if for last). I was thinking, as I read the comments on my last post, that I rarely write out physical lists. I do something much worse; I carry a constant checklist in my head (with "clean litter box," "bathe kids" and "homework" at the bottom, of course).

Today, I dropped my daughter off at school, came home and sat straight down to write, as I always do. Only I couldn't think of anything to write today. So, I told myself, "You don't have to do the writing now. Why don't you get up and do some of those other chores and errands and then come back to the writing. By then you'll surely have thought of something. And if you don't, then you don't even have to write at all. You can take a day away from the keyboard." And I found that I couldn't. The idea of trying to write after I clean up and have lunch instead of before?! That's horrifying! An abomination! I can't do that. What a crazy disruption of my day. The world might end or my mind might fracture.

So, once again I find that my notoriously inflexible, compulsive son doesn't get it from nowhere. Unlike him, I'm not ready to startle anyone by changing where I sit. But at least I found something to write about.