Notes on Routine

sameness is not dull; repetition is not unimaginative

1. For more than a year, I’ve had the same breakfast. Three half-fried eggs, two toasts, and a cup of coffee. Sat at my desk all day to write. Put on an episode from the same show I’ve now seen four times. Played with my cat when she burst with energy, reached for a second cup of coffee come midday, watched the herons arrive in the evening on the gulmohar tree. Stepped out for a walk or a workout and moved my body. For about eighteen months, I have lived somewhat the same day over and over again and come to see repetition as not dull or unimaginative, but as coherence. The smallest units of my day lived in coherence with my desires.

   
   But there’s also something else. Routine pulls taut the loose strings of my day whenever it goes off-tune. Not that I’m a great singer, but I can sing comfortably in the F scale. To me, these specific moments of sameness are like the F scale to my days, especially to my writing life. Tuned in, I can sing without my voice quivering, I reach all the high notes.
   

2. Goodmorning/Goodmorning/Goodmorning/Goodmorning/Goodmorning/Goodmorning/Goodmorning/Goodmorning/Goodmorning/Goodmorning/Goodmorning/Goodmorning/for one thousand eight hundred and ninety-five mornings since my mother and I have lived in different houses or cities, a goodmorning arrives in my inbox without fail. I respond. We tell each other we are alive and we are okay. I may miss one day but never the next. For I am made real by my mother calling out to me. To be part of someone’s routine is to be pulled out of some slumber, to be summoned into existence.
   

3. Routine comes from the word route, a path taken regularly. Some deeply original things I have seen on the same path in my neighbourhood:

   
   a woman with five dogs / a silver-haired man dance-walking alone to a song, phone held out like a speaker / a mannequin with a facemask / a cat with a moustache / a 50-something woman in a pink tank top, shiny black skirt with stockings reaching her big black boots, headphones curled around her neck, hair tied in two space buns, an anime character in a bollywood world / a group of kids stealing a potted plant / an electric meter with “DANGER 💀440 volts ” and a statue of a god on its top / shopkeepers cooling the street in front of their shop with splashes of water / “BODY MASSAGE. 100% RELIEF GUARANTEE & WARRANTY”
   

4. A trampoline from which one can leap, swivel, and return has its fixtures in the ground. A freediver descends along a weighted rope that becomes a compass in the deep water. Even improv begins with a prompt - a line, a word, a cue to riff off of. A kite soars because of the tension with what’s holding it steady.
   

5. Toni Morrison wrote in the pre-dawn dark, before her children woke and the world beckoned. Mary Oliver walked the woods each morning, notebook in hand, writing in response to whatever rose to meet her there. Joan Didion returned to her pages at night, sipping on a drink, feeling aptly distant from her words to review them. I’ve always felt the point of knowing an artist’s routine was not to emulate it but to be satisfied by the fact it existed. To know there is a path to good work and that is devotion. The routine itself is a key to a lock, but a specific key to a specific lock. It is the devotion to the rhythm that is always the point.
   

6. Each of my two grandfathers had this routine that is imprinted in my adult mind. One loved walking. So when I was four until maybe I was nine, every other day, depending on his work shift, we’d be walking to one of the various parks around our home. I remember a little bridge under which rowed ducks in a greenish pond. I remember swings and five shades of bougainvillea petals he’d pluck and place in my cupped palms. I remember picking a pack of jalebis on the way to eat when we reached the park. My other grandfather, whom we met not more than a few times a year, brought with him a set of Milky Bar chocolates each visit. I never did indulge in Milky Bar chocolates except when he brought them for us.
   

   When everything fades, we total what our life adds up to, I suspect this will make it through the sieve. Not for the simple thing extended to children, but for its repetition over time, for a commitment to that kindness. Some privilege it is to be given a warm image to carry over the years, hopefully into death, of a little girl with a Milky Bar chocolate trotting to a park.
   

7. Things we do every day without thinking are habits. Things that accumulate meaning with repetition become rituals. Things that erode meaning with repetition become duty, roles, later expectations, later unpaid, invisible labour.
   

8. Every week, turning the lump of freshly washed clothes into neatly folded piles arranged by color and type and utility, I feel still and safe. Deep in the administration of living, of clothes that need folding, books that need dusting, a couch that needs dry cleaning, again and again and again and again, I find a path. After all, it is a thing that is comprehensible, a thing that is fixable, a thing that demands me to keep moving.
   

9. In the slowest, most mundane acts — brushing our teeth, taking a shower, falling asleep — the mind is free of judgment. It’s in the state of near-autopilot, when we’re doing something so familiar it needs no thought, that ideas slip through because our critical, judgy side of the brain is not alert. Routine, then, isn’t simply a foundation for the creative life, rather a conduit, a doorway for creativity. One of the many things I learnt from my conversation with Dr. Sid in this interview.
   
   

10. Folded in my cupboards are many kinds of easy whites and beiges that I now wear for days spent indoors, writing. I don’t exactly miss the years when going to work meant spending an hour mixing and matching outfits that were meant to say something. When sitting down to write, I feel like paring down what I am wearing to something simple, as if I were rerouting the channel through which I will speak.
    
    

11. It is summer, R is away. Perhaps it is her anxiety of not seeing the third of our pack around that my cat Kiki wakes me up as soon as the sun is out. So at 6:30 every morning she parks herself beside me and meows. Her punctuated, elongated, melodic meow-yow, I translate as “mother, please”. Spare me the psychoanalysis. It is impossible to sleep past the incantation of mother, please, so I get up, feed her, and find myself the recipient of two extra hours in the morning that I hadn’t planned in my day. I use them however I want, because that’s what you do with gifts.
    

12. How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives, says Annie Dillard. I’ve always read this less as wisdom, more as warning. A warning against days spent deliberating, worrying, not doing the thing we want to do, or doing the thing we don’t want to do. To be fair, not just a warning, but Annie also gifts us a question within this idea. What is the smallest thing I want to do right now that I could happily do every day of my life? which to me is a better question than its overwhelming and obnoxious counterpart, Where do I see myself in ten years from now?
    

13. I brought Kiki a string toy after how much she loved her last one. This one has tiny bells like those in trinkets, so in addition to the feathery end of the string that she likes to chase, she is taken by the sound. Her routine of play ever so slightly with the iterations we make. Iteration, though derived from the word repetition, is a more generous word. It allows for intent and learning and though small and invisible now, only seen through a large expanse of time, some deeply meaningful change.
    

14. My current playlist as I sit to write. Another I always go back to is this.
    

    

    Announcement:
    Hi! I’m doing essay writing workshops every weekend. We do three sessions together and a lot of writing and reading in between, journeying from an idea to a finished 1000-word essay. Details and registration link here. Write back if you have any questions :)