I have a confession to make

As un-sexy as it sounds, I have always wanted to be the kind of person who could follow a routine. Getting up every day and doing exactly the same thing somehow seemed like making it as an adult.
Perhaps it comes from having a father who has eaten the same cereal at breakfast for at least thirty years. Legend has it that even when we ran out of milk shortly after I was born, he just added 7-up to the bowl and went on with his day. (He couldn't eat dry cereal! Come on!) On vacations, we brought the mini-boxes of cereal along with us. The routine went unchanged, unruffled, by major or minor inconveniences. It was sacred.

My desire for repetition extends far beyond cereal (which allergies prevent me from eating anymore). I have read and re-read those writing books that tell you to write a certain amount each day, from fifteen minutes to 750 words to whatever. I read them because they seem so romantic to me. The routine of it all. I have always wanted to be able to predict, with some reliability, just how long something would take and how many weeks or hours before I would finish it. I have wanted to come home and cook and eat at a certain time. And then to know what comes next. Whether it be an episode of Matlock or MacGuyver as it was for my parents, or a softball game or a warm bath.

But the only real routines that exist in my life are 1. sleeping, and 2. walking my dog.  In fact, getting Bandit was life-changing for me because it enforced more regularity to my days than I'd experienced since high school. And I do try to religiously go to sleep at the same time every night. That's it though.

Even in high school I was truant because I simply was not able to conform to the daily and weekly schedules of class. Technically, they shouldn't have allowed me to graduate, because I'd missed too much school. (It's amazing what being white and having decent grades will get you though). And I didn't miss class because I was a bad student or not interested, but because I don't work well on strict and repetitive schedules. I start to feel like a zombie.

This has always been painful to me. Everyone else seemed able to get up and go to school every day. They didn't look like their souls were dying if they couldn't do exactly what they wanted to whenever they wanted to do it. People like my father seem to find great comfort in having the same job or the same cereal day after day, year after year. I even ran away from Girl Scout camp once because they wouldn't let me just run around in the woods. I was expected at arts and crafts at a certain time, and horseback riding at another, and swimming at another. I hated it. Who hates camp?

And that is what I find so heartbreaking. I see the comfort other people find in routines and schedules and I want not just the routine, but the reassurance of one.

Lately though I have realized that maybe in my own way I do have routines. They just look a little different. Rather than doing the same thing Monday through Friday, my routine works on seasonal cycles. I am, as it turns out, just as predictable as everyone else. I had just never realized it.

From November to January I seem to go deeply inward, in hibernation mode. If I look back across several years, I have done this consistently, though in varying ways. Last year I was at the Christine Center. The year before, I stopped going out and studied for my second prelim. The year before, I was very sick for months and couldn't leave my house much. During this time there are clear patterns. I crave hot yoga and saunas and hot baths, as if my body needs the heat to make it through the season, however mild. The pattern holds, year after year.

And then in the spring, I write. I wrote my master's thesis in the spring, and my dissertation. The spring is a time when I am better at producing things, with a kind of focus I have difficulty describing. My body just enters flow-mode more easily. But as I become more enmeshed in my work, I also remain somewhat removed from others. Something about that particular time of year makes me unsettled inside and to need to ground myself above all else. I do that through my work.
 

Bandit enjoying the spring writing routine at his favorite cafe.

The writing flows through the summer, lessening. I become extroverted, and spend as much time out-of-doors as I can. If it were possible to sit outside in a yard and people-watch with a glass of wine and friends and my dog every single night, I would do it. I love to have people over. I love to garden and bike and walk. I play team sports 2-3 nights a week. I lessen up on yoga, because I'd rather be outside than in a studio. In the summer, despite my extroversion, I rarely encounter any personal drama of any kind, though in August, my travel season begins. And I embark on airplanes as if they are my second home. I become energized at conferences and from seeing new places and moving outside of my comfort zone.

Autumn is my favorite season. Though it is the hardest for me to characterize. The last couple of years it has been a time of literal death in my life. First my grandfather and then my brother. Autumn is a time of dreams I think though, pretty consistently. It is when I imagine where I would like to be and who I want to be and where I am going next. My body is most at peace during this time of year, though it also takes on a character of both loneliness and excitement. This may simply be part of my shift from extroversion to introversion. I apply for many grants in the autumn because it is when I dream the biggest and get the most excited about new possibilities and adventures and the future. Whereas in the spring, I am too hunkered down with the immediate tasks before me to see anything but the trees.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. These aren't just activity changes based on weather. They are lifestyle changes that encompass everything from how social I am, to what I produce, to what I think about, to how I feel.

The trees drop their leaves, bears hibernate, and birds fly south.

I run up hard against the desire to march to the beat of the drum most other people seem to hear. It is often confusing to build a life around where the wind takes you. It feels like everyone else gets up and goes to work. The lines at Starbucks are predictable. The rush hour traffic is predictable. The lunch rush is predictable. I lack the comfort of writing "a page a day, a book a year" as an old sociology director once directed me. In fact, by the end of winter, I frequently experience doubts that I'll ever be able to write again. Just like in summer, I experience doubts that I will ever remember how to be alone.

And yet, if I look across an entire year at a time... everything I want for myself is contained within it. And if I look across an entire year, I see that I achieve and am all that I want or need to be. It takes a different kind of faith, to trust that with each season, the appropriate shift will follow.

But why not? These rhythms move through our bodies. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, we are taught that we each have a rhythm/season/element that dominates. Metal, water, wood, fire, earth. Autumn, winter, spring, summer, the equinoxes. Regardless of which one we most resonate with, the world around us moves through them too. And it seems only natural to respond accordingly.

So perhaps instead of feeling strangely outcast for my lack of participation in Starbucks lines and rush hour traffic, I can bring attention to a different kind of routine we all likely embody to varying degrees.

The seasons are more than just weather. They are actually ways of being.

Namaste.