Avoiding Monotony in a Routine
The pandemic has made it hard for all of us to do things outside of our homes. This might have been a bad time to start the project but the sacrifices we have made have been worth it to keep people safe. But I am going to try to make the most of what I am able to do now.
I have been trying to start with small things that are easy to do without having to go places. For example, just trying out making new meals. Recently, I’ve been having to do work around the house that has even made that difficult. I want to try to focus on setting aside time now that I’m wrapping these projects up to get back into new things.
It seems like in these times where we’re not able to do a whole lot, the small things can be more interesting than they normally would be. The other weekend, I made myself what could only loosely be called huevos rancheros, even that felt like a small victory! It felt nice to eat something different because I had fallen into eating the same breakfast for the past month. I had been eating the same thing because of work; overall I feel as though my job has locked me into a monotonous routine that has left me defeated and unmotivated. Even just having one different breakfast, helped me to break out of this and I felt much better after. I was excited to have made something for myself that was good and different.
This may seem counterintuitive after last week's post, but it is important to distinguish between routine and monotony. Establishing a routine helps you create a better headspace to live in, but if you aren’t careful can lead to monotony. I think I was structuring my routine too much and not allowing for enough deviations. Instead of having “make breakfast” on my schedule, it had become “make an English muffin.” This kind of specificity can be helpful in certain situations but it leads to a constriction to possibilities and, for me, it lead to the monotony I was feeling everyday. I need to allow myself more options within the structure of my day-to-day planning to make sure that I don’t keep doing the same thing day-in-and-day-out.
I think this over-structuring is what lead me to struggle to do some of the things that I wanted to do. For example, I have wanted to go hiking but I kept limiting myself to going to the White Mountains. While I do want to go to the White Mountains, I was overly focused on that and did open myself up to the possibility of going hiking locally. Hiking is an activity that I enjoy, I shouldn’t be limiting myself to a trip that I can’t plan yet when there are dozens of trails near me that I could hike.
This can be applied to a lot of other activities, not just hiking. It’s easy to get lost in a specific subset of something we enjoy and artificially cut off our access to that activity. Sometimes we need to take smaller, more attainable steps in order to be able to take that final big step towards the thing we really want to do. I specifically need to allow myself to do smaller things before I try tackling bigger projects.
Specifically, something that will come up later, both on the blog and--hopefully--on the Youtube channel, is woodworking. I have had my sights set on a couple of really large, daunting tasks that I really want to do; however, I don’t have the skills--or even the tools--necessary to start these projects. I have realized that I need to start tackling smaller projects in order to work my way up to the bigger projects. This is something I often find with myself that I try to tackle tasks that are way above my skill level and I get disappointed when I am not able to do them. I am realizing now that I need to start small and work my way up and not be defeated that I can’t do The Big Thing yet. I think this will become a theme of this blog because there are a lot of things in life that you can’t just do. They require skills and work in order to perfect them and I can’t let myself be defeated if I can’t do them quickly or on my first try. Some things in life are just difficult and sometimes it’s hard to admit that. There is nothing wrong with trying something and failing, but there is something wrong with not doing something because you’re afraid to fail.
