Wrestling With Wroutine
Great routines can support your art. They can also lead to staleness & boredom. How do you strike the right balance?
Hi folks,
This week, I've been wrestling with routines.
As a father of three, I know how important it can be. Routine is the thin line of protection between me and an overwhelming anarchy of emotions, tantrums, and demands. When our routine is disrupted, all sorts of things start to glitch out. Easy things like putting on shoes become a battlefield as my kids attempt to flex control against uncertainty. Multiple pairs of shoes later, I usually end up having to carry them out of the house in socks.
Funnily enough, I don't think the rest of us are actually that different in some ways. Parenting certainly exaggerates it, but a good routine is so important for everyone. It's a source of stability, a crutch that allows us to move forward without questioning everything we do every day. Living with too much uncertainty can wear you down. When everything is up for grabs, it's really stressful. Routines allow us to shortcut all that, to know that some things "we just do."
Learning is no exception. A great way to improve is to make learning a core part of your routine. I'm pretty good at playing piano because for a substantial portion of my life I practiced every day (I still do, mostly). When I was a kid, I did it after school. Now, I tend to do it first thing in the morning. It's routine — automatic, easy, not something I need to think about.
Most of the best musicians in history have relied on routine. Ludwig van Beethoven woke up at dawn every day, counted out 60 coffee beans precisely to make his coffee, and then got to work, followed by a mid-afternoon walk. Erik Satie says in his memoir: "I rise at 7:18; am inspired from 10:23 to 11:47. I lunch at 12:11 and leave the table at 12:14. A healthy ride on horse-back round my domain follows from 1:19 pm to 2:53 pm. Another bout of inspiration from 3:12 to 4:07 pm." I can't say I relate, but it clearly worked for him.
In summary, I highly recommend that you set up routines to support your creative work: schedules that you stick to, productive habits and patterns that fit naturally into your life and support your aims, etc.
But there is of course a dark side to routine as well. We've all experienced routines that start to feel soul-crushing after a while, and when something's too automatic, you start to take it for granted. If you walk the same street every day, you might lose sight of the flowers that grow along it. For example, there have been times in my life when I practiced a lot, when practice was a core part of my daily schedule, but I barely made any progress. It all became too routine. I wasn't pushing myself, and because of that, my playing started to feel stale.
Basically, it's easy to get comfortable, and comfort can be the enemy of progress. As I've written before, the best learning requires being at the edge of your comfort zone.
One of my favorite essays of all time is a 2005 commencement speech by David Foster Wallace. In it, he talks about how the greatest skill you can learn is how to find meaning in the day-to-day mundanity of grown up life, about choosing what to worship to stay alive to the world and all that's possible within it. In other words, how to ward off the malaise of routine.
As musicians, I think this is our great strength and our deep gift, both to ourselves and to the world. Our practice is intensely worshipful. We make music, this magical, ineffable thing that can make the dullest moment shine bright. We're sorcerers of sound, bringing melodies to life from nothing. At the end of a long day, we can unearth meaning by playing a note, a melody, or a song. We can converse with others through collaborations, get lost in the moment through improvisation, obsess over the most minute of details in a production.
It's easy to forget about this power you hold. That music can help you find meaning in the mundane.
This week, I challenge you to think about your routines, and routine in general, and the role it plays in your life. Where is routine supporting your creativity, and where is it holding you back? Where do you need to shake things up?
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Shout out to Jeremy Young for suggesting I change the subject line to Wrestling With Wroutines. Gotta get that alliteration in there.