Suffocation Routine

It always begins with a positive, elated experience of some sort. We find something new that fulfills a need we didn’t know we had. Maybe it was that new trail one found at the park that charmed the eye, or maybe it was a group of people you met after you had just moved to a new state that satiated a social need. We find things that water our souls. Many of us tend to do the same thing thereafter – returning to these things endlessly after discovering them, like an addict looking for further sustenance, only to find that with prolonged exposure that they lose their shine.

What once felt like the burgeoning beginnings of an enhanced lifestyle quickly becomes the doldrums of mediocrity. The magic vanishes and is replaced with something else: a type of predictability that undercuts us severely.

At this point, we realize that there are simply not many other options than that which we have already routinely committed ourselves to. There is no “real other option”, than that which we lie to ourselves about still enjoying. Whenever a suggestion of an alternative appears, it is struck down by all that “it doesn’t offer me which is within the realms of my routine”. It’s a constrictor that slowly slithers up our leg while we were still enjoying the relative newness of our changed lifestyle, gently wrapping its smooth disgusting body along our limbs until it has enough hold of us to squeeze us into a form of paralysis that is hard to escape. Pessimism rears its head, and begins to rule most of our life – and we didn’t even realize its usurpation of us.

It kills our hearts cry for play, for creativity, for new beginnings, for self-development, and inspiration. By extension, it destroys our joy in life, hobbles our relationships, deadens our workplace, asphyxiates creative thought, and worst of all, makes us blind to the myriad of promising possibilities that our life can investigate and enjoy.

And if we are not careful, we call this snake our friend; call this horrendous predictability “life”, and deceive ourselves into thinking that that which was previous a watering hole for the needs of our inmost being still nurtures us.

The reality is a different one: we become cowards to newness. Fear of leaving behind “what works” dwells out of reach of our consciousness. We become disassociated with the needs of our inmost being thinking we are still addressing them with “what worked before”. While thinking we are addressing our inner needs, we have in reality abandoned them. We now feed our needs with empty events.

And the snake that threatens to consume us appears in a precise moment – exactly when we compromised our worth for the watering hole. Exactly in the moments where our value is equated with the nurture we get from the things we preoccupy ourselves with. “I’m valuable when I am involved in this thing” replaces a truth many of us have never considered: “My value has nothing to do with the daily events that nurture me”. The delusion is found in this lie: “I am able to determine what is best for me.”

It’s not that our value exists as a force inherently within us – that would make us profoundly inhumane. Instead we must get it from our moment-by-moment nurture-filled walk with God. It’s the true endeavor of our lives as created, relational beings. Life is guidance from a being that surpasses us, and understands our needs better than we are able to. It requires the denial of what seems a place of nurture, for a place the shepherd of our lives says is better than it. It is a mindset in which one receives a day from God, instead of one that dictates it to ourselves.

It begins with admitting the painful reality that something no longer works – it might require creating distance from people that once were good in life, abandoning social events that now fail to establish your true self, it may even simply be relinquishing control over when you do certain events in your day because routine invariably kills joy when it is allowed to flourish unchecked.

In its place, we must venture into areas unknown. Maybe we don’t even know where or what that is – but we must go somewhere new anyways. To collect new experiences, to augment the new selves that our previous routines have transformed us in to. We must face uncertainties and dangers in the things that are new to us – even if they are relatively small. Thrill does not exist without perceived risk; rounded confidence does not exist apart from victories. We require not individual events, but trajectory of risks and victories. Living is a form of continual movement.

Maybe a correct state of living exists alongside the thought that we must adore the unknown, the untraversed, the chaotic, and unpredictable. Or even better, the love of being free of forms of enslavement from that which we routinely enjoy.

We must because staying where we are is self-sabotage. There is no standing still – only a form of regression.