This weekend I visited some friends in Raleigh. It was a great trip – like an extended adult sleepover – and one that was long overdue. I needed a break from my routine, and the late nights, fast food and video game binges did the trick.
To borrow from Jonathan Haidt, I view routine as a way to strengthen the connection between the elephant and the rider. It’s my way of ensuring that the rational side of me (the rider) wins out over the emotional side (the elephant). Routine is what gives me a fighting chance to ignore all my strongest impulses: to eat cheeseburgers, to stay up late watching shows, and to sleep in past noon. Not that there’s anything wrong with those – it’s just that none work particularly well for me in anything more than moderation. Sleeping in makes me anxious, and while I can’t explain why, I can build a routine that keeps it from happening.
But I’ve struggled in the past few years to remind myself that routine in itself is not the end-goal, but a means to an end. In an ideal world, if my rider was 100% in control, I wouldn’t need any structure – I would just make the right decisions, all of the time. I could keep a family-sized bag of sour cream and onion chips at home and eat them slowly, five chips per day. I could buy Call of Duty and play it just one hour per week. It’s only in the absence of such harmony between rider and elephant that I keep myself from those things.
This trip to Raleigh was a great example of how routine and flexibility can coexist. For a few days, my habits weren’t needed. I could shift when I slept to later at night. I could forgo journaling, or skip a day of running. Just because something is a net positive most of the time doesn’t mean it is all of the time – and if I’d gone to North Carolina and not gotten a cheddar-style big double burger tray from Cook Out I’d have been denying my elephant and my rider what they wanted most.
Maybe I’m the only one who thinks about this, but I doubt it. I want to have the willpower to go to bed when everyone else is staying up, because I know that I’ll be a worse person the next day because of it. But I also want to be able to stay up late when there’s good reason to, without the fear of ruining tomorrow hanging over my head. It’s a delicate balance that I still don’t have a great grasp on.
That I can know this to be true and still beat myself up over lapses in my routine is a fundamental source of tension in my life. It’s hardly ever the case that I don’t know the path to better outcomes – it’s getting the elephant to go along with me that’s the challenge. And that’s just as true with building good habits as it is with treating my own lapses compassionately. I know that it’s impossible to maintain a routine on a group trip with friends, yet I’m still sitting here on Sunday feeling like I let things slip a bit too much. It reminds me of this Marcus Aurelius line, which Maria Popova quoted in Brain Pickings this week:
“The things of the world cannot affect the soul; they lie inert outside it, and only internal beliefs disturb it.”
I’m the one giving weight to these Sunday night feelings, and I’m the only one who can change that.
If you get a chance, read the Brain Pickings piece, which covers a similar struggle beautifully: “Little syphons the joy of life more surely than the wasted energy of indignation at how others have failed to behave in accordance with what we expected of them.” Tell me about. I spent all of ten minutes in the airport security line today, and my indignation at the inefficiency and ineptitude of everyone in line – everyone except me, of course – was bursting out my ears. Another great example of a situation in which the only person with a problem is me, for letting myself get frustrated over such stupid, trivial things.
Spring Flowers
I was never much of a flower guy until last May, when Anne and I came back to New York in the early months of the pandemic to find Brooklyn in full bloom. Now, roughly a year later, I can’t pass a flowerbed without stopping to snap a picture. It’s remarkable how much color has sprouted in our neighborhood in the past few weeks:
If I wasn’t a flower guy in the past, I definitely wasn’t a buying flowers guy. I really didn’t see the point of buying something just to look at it for a week and then throw it away. And while I’m still not there yet on purchasing any of my own, I’ve changed my tune on the idea. I completely understand the urge to do so. Flowers are beautiful to look at. Almost confusingly so. How does so much color just come to be?
– Emmett
Recent Posts:
Flip Flop Season! – Crossing over into the best time of the year. (Blog, 4 min)
What I’m Reading:
When the Techies Took Over Tahoe – Rachel Levin, Outside Magazine
“Jobs in the mountains rarely came with Slack accounts or stock options or even, very often, full-time salaries. You were either employed by the mountain or the restaurants, shops, and hotels surrounding it, or you carved your own path as a free agent and Lived the Dream, making bank and riding bumps. But in Zoom town, you can work for Pinterest and ski powder. The Dream has become a reality, and with it, the potential for a kind of culture clash that inherently follows all that cash: when those who have it and those who don’t begin living side by side.”
Ready – Liam Boylan-Pett
“A young team, only one Georgetown runner had raced N.C.A.A.s before. Jack Salisbury, a senior, told me they were all ready to hurt. They wished they had more than one race under their belts, but they were at least happy they were getting another chance to race. And he was ready to go.”