20140103.0730

There is a sense that falling into a routine is somehow a bad thing, that it promotes laziness and a dissatisfaction with the way things are.  In that sense, routines make for grinding boredom, and being bored is to be avoided in the mainstream culture of the United States (how else to account for the ubiquitous mini-game on smartphone and other device?).  And I admit that I have felt some of that sense; I have looked at myself and been disgusted with the rut my steps have carved as I have gone about the daily circuits I have set for myself.  I have thought that I should do something different, equating different with better in my mind, as if to change is necessarily to improve.

It is not, of course.  The last time I complained aloud of being bored was in the summer of 2002.  I was spending time at my parents' house in the Texas Hill Country (I am sure I will come up with a name for the place soon), and I had spent most of a week rereading Asimov's Robot, Empire, and Foundation novels.  My mother chastised me for not going out into the town and seeing what it had to offer.  (I wonder if she had forgotten in that moment that I had grown up in the town and knew well what it had to offer--including people around whom I am still uncomfortable more than a decade later.)  In curmudgeonly indignation, I replied that the town bored me, and that I found escape from that grinding boredom in the books I was reading--and nowhere else that was readily available to me.

The next day, it began to rain.  Over the next two or three days, some fifty-one inches of rain fell on and around my hometown, and that much rain will flood most any place.  In the Hill Country town of my youth, it caused flash flooding; my parents' house stands a lot away from and some twenty feet above a creek, and in the time it took to look from backyard to front yard and back, the creek rose such that we could see its foaming top from the house.  We could see the waters raging through our part of town, backing up against the woodpile that my mother and I demolished in the vain hope of easing the flow (although I remain proud to have tossed about massive chunks of wood--Hill Country post oak cut no smaller than yard-long cylinders half a yard across--as though they were paper).  We could see our kitchen become creek-front property as the living room became creek bed.  And we could see what was left when the rains stopped and the flood waters finally flowed away: houses shifted from their foundations or swept away altogether, people's lives waterlogged and ruined, and the slow efforts to repair and restore things begun.  (Nobody died in the flood, as I recall, and injuries were minor at most.  Fortunately, for many backs were needed to bend beneath the work to follow.)

It was an exciting time, certainly.  But it was not worth the price exacted for it.  And if I over-assert my importance to think that my complaint triggered the weather and the upstream dam failure that created the flood, neither am I willing to take the chance that it did not.  I will not need to have the lesson repeated; boredom is sometimes a good thing.  If nothing else, it means things are not going wrong.  Routines, therefore, are not so bad as they are sometimes thought to be.  Not necessarily.