Routine

In general, I seem to be quite happy with a fairly chaotic life. I’ve never really done the entire ‘career path’ thing – and if pushed I’d probably still stick with the definition of ‘career’ as ‘to ricochet wildly from place to place’ instead of the more standard ‘job progression’ definition.

However, in other ways I have put a lot of routine into my life. There’s a good reason for this, which I’ll get to in a minute, but I am aware that in many ways my days are quite routine when seen in the context of someone who professes to prefer a chaotic life. In fact, in general you can predict the rough outline of my days quite easily – when I’m likely to get up, what my morning activities will be, where I’ll go for lunch, that kind of thing. It’s not to any serious OCD-like level, but yeah, there’s a definite schedule to a fair amount of what I do.

Actually, there’s two primary reasons, if I think about it. First is that human life doesn’t really manage all that well when faced with a truly random lifestyle. The brain likes a routine, for whatever reason. And a ‘normal’ working life also imposes on that routine – the train timetable, the working hours, the 7½hour working day, they all combine to make a routine for a major portion of the day.

The second reason is rather more personal – if I have a sketched-out routine, I can deal with it even when my brain isn’t working at full power. And in the days where I was suffering from really serious insomnia, it was a good bet than when I was awake, I wasn’t operating on anywhere near full power. Hell, it would’ve needed passport control to even get into the same country as full power. So a routine allowed me to operate on what could be fairly termed as ‘autopilot’ – and operate fairly well. Most of the time, unless I was working on far too long with minimal sleep, moost people probably didn’t even realise how badly sleep-stumped I was.

Now though, I seem to be doing a bit better for sleep. Or at least it’s nowhere near as bad as it used to be. It’s still incredibly disturbed, and so shallow that even Hound walking around will wake me up, but it’s better than it ever used to be. And the routine is still there – I’m not as sure why, now, except that it’s just ingrained into my subconscious.