It was a few weeks after Grocery Store Parking Lot Realization Day (see previous post) when I had another one of those “Aha!” moments…
I’d gotten home from one of our daily drive-children-somewhere-and-drop-them-off trips. I’m not sure what it was exactly that got my attention that morning, and got me so melancholy. Maybe it was the fact that I’d just been going through the motions of yet another one of our daily routines, and there was something about the cyclical nature of family life that was weighing on me and draining me. I don’t know.
I just remember pulling into our driveway that morning and getting out of the car and thinking to myself, The way you’re living is just not working. I may even have said it out loud. (I do that sometimes.)
That was quite a realization too.
The way you’re living is just not working.
Maybe this was an extension of Epiphany #1, the idea that radical reorientation was called for. It washed over me that day (as did the rain, standing there in the driveway) that if change was going to happen, the change I knew needed to happen, if the battleship was going to be turned, then I needed to start thinking outside the box, and blow things up, and step outside my routinized comfort zones, and try something, anything, different. Even if there didn’t seem to be any apparent purpose to it at first.
So I did.
In that moment I thought to myself, I know this isn’t part of the morning routine, and I know this will probably throw off my plans for the next few hours, but who cares, I’m just going to go for a walk. A good, long, pensive, rain-soaked, neighborhood walk. With no agenda. So I did. I set out down the street, and suddenly I was off and…walking. I felt like Forrest Gump. “Walk, Forrest, walk!” And I just kept going.
OK, OK, I know, going for a neighborhood walk might seem like the most pedestrian thing a person can do. (Get it? Get it? “Pedestrian”? Get it?!) Hardly earth-shattering and groundbreaking and revolutionary and blow-things-up and all of that. I know. But in that moment, it was one simple and obvious thing I could think to do that felt like taking the deck of cards and throwing it into the air and messing everything up.
And the amazing thing is, it worked. (It also got me drenched, but that’s beside the point.) As simple as that idea was, it actually did turn out to be kind of a big deal. I don’t remember exactly what date that was, but I’ve been walking ever since. Every morning. Early. Miles and miles. I can hardly believe it. And those morning walks have made a big difference.
The point is, that realization—the way you’re living is just not working—turned into something. It kicked my butt, and inspired me to shake things up a little. It instilled in me some of that “what have you got to lose?” If the way you’ve been living has made you feel like a vanishing man, a warped, frustrated old man (thank you, George Bailey), then what’s the harm in trying some other approach? Why not make a decision in this moment that isn’t the decision you’d have made yesterday, and see what happens?
For better or for worse, it reminds me of that “Seinfeld” episode where George comes to the conclusion that every instinct he’s ever had was wrong, so that every decision he’s ever made was misguided, and so he might as well start doing the opposite of everything that occurs to him as what he ought to do. So he starts living that way. And what’s the result? Naturally, he lands the dream girl and the dream job and the dream apartment and the dream Manhattan life. Perfect.
So I’ve started trying an approach something like. I’ve tried to find ways in the course of an average day to mix things up, to depart from routines, to counter expectations. Even if it’s just small things (and it usually is). Whether it’s going for a walk or watching something different on TV (or staying away from the TV this time) or not getting a haircut even though it’s been a while or putting my phone down for a few hours or reaching for a pair of shoes I concluded months ago wasn’t me or finding a different place in the house to read or rearranging a few pieces of furniture or listening to a podcast instead of music even though I always listen to music. Try something different, already! Like, say, writing a blog.
To be clear, the point in all this is not simply to be contrarian and anti-routine. The goal isn’t to make each day utterly unlike any day that went before it. (Indeed, one of the happy results of this campaign has been to lead me to better routines! Like that daily morning two-mile walk.) No, the goal is to step outside my usual vantage point in order to discover alternative perspectives and patterns that might actually lead me to deeper ways of living better.
You might even say, this very perspective is itself its own kind of new routine. I want it to be regularly, steadily true of me…that I throw the cards in the air and see how they land and look at what I can learn from them.
The challenge, I’ve found, is to go about life this way all the while having to keep up the many daily defining routines that can’t be discarded. I still have to work certain hours during the day, and take the kids to school, and eat my family meals when the family does, etc., etc. As the saying goes, it feels like trying to fix the airplane while in mid-flight. How much easier it would be if I could call time-out on life (land the plane, as it were), and step away for months and months, and consider and evaluate and deliberate and make changes in a place of peace and tranquility, and then return to life as a new man with everything figured out. But it doesn’t work that way. Today, right now, life must go on, and I’ve got to find a way to mess some things up and see what it gets me at the same time that I preserve and persevere in the things that can’t be messed up and disregarded.
Not easy. It’s a fight. But it’s a fight worth fighting. And in fact, some of the changes I’ve made lately have had the happy effect of opening up some time and space and breathing-thinking room in the midst of my daily routines so that I can ponder all this.
It’s not usually a good thing to take a George Costanza approach to life. But here I am. And it’s working.
Maybe I should try “Serenity now” while I’m at it.