Break the Routine and You May Save a Life: Your Own
Raymond Chandler said: Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.
Routine dries the soul and turns it into a desert. Routine gives you that sense that time is racing and you’ve been left behind. Routine can set in like woodworm, or migraine, or cancer. Routine is a habit, an addiction that can only be cured by the healing power of change.
What can we do to break the routine?
There are almost as many make-over ideas on the web as porn sites. How to find the partner of your dreams on the latest dating hub. How to be tall. How to be happy. How to lose 30lbs in 15 minutes. We all want to be the most we can be and have more than we’ve got. This is the human condition and the marketing men tune into that fact with unrelenting skill.
The answer isn’t to make sweeping changes but small, realistic changes. By breaking the routine, we create a new mind-set that sends out an unexpected pulse that pumps the blood around the body at a different rhythm and can even renew our perception of life itself.
Start with something easy. Buy a bike, or take the old bike out of the garage and go for a ride in the country. Go apple picking for a day. Buy a sketch pad, walk to the park, sit on the grass and draw a tree. Go somewhere you have never been before without a plan to do anything when you get there. Just see what happens. Explore. Let your eyes wander over fresh sights. Breathe in a different air. Breathe deeply. It feels good and it costs nothing.
Feed the Hungry
Routine is a cloud blocking the sun; a veil that makes everything seem dimmer. If you do the same things every day, time doesn’t merely appear to go faster, it does go faster. When you change the daily grind, it will feel as if a magnet has pulled back the hands on the clock. You feel refreshed, sparky, younger. Routine conjures up thoughts of eternity and eternity is not an extension of time, but an absence of time, a void.
The problem with life-changing makeovers is that they are hard to keep up and we hate ourselves when we give up. Brief excursions from the predictable are not only easy to achieve, they stick in our minds – the tree you drew in the park is still in the sketch pad, better than any photograph.
People save for years to take a cruise or spend two weeks in Thailand or Bali or in Africa on Safari. Such adventures do stay in the memory, but after the money’s spent and the video has been shown to family and friends, the routine returns, more soul destroying than ever.
Try learning a language or to play a musical instrument. Take tap dancing lessons. Join an amateur dramatic society. Start a book club. Clean out all the closets and anything you haven’t worn or used for three years, give it to charity, or have a yard sale, a good opportunity to renew friendships with the neighbours.
I just read an article with statistics from the United Nations World Food Programme: 842 million people in the world do not have enough to eat. What can we do? How can we change our routine AND help the starving people of the world?
You could start a group on Facebook. Call it…I don’t know: People Aid. Ask me to join. It’s free. It’s easy. Post your opinions and see what other like-minded people have to say. The more involved you become, the more likely you are to see a way to achieve your own goals – and you may save some lives, including your own.
Do you have any ideas for making simple changes? Leave them in the comment box – no puzzles, all free. And there is one more place where you can feed your brain and stop the years passing like the wind: in the pages of a good book.
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The post Break the Routine and You May Save a Life: Your Own appeared first on Chloe Thurlow.
