Creatures of habit
When routines become ruts and how to break out of them
I have mixed feelings about routines.
On the one hand, I crave them. I like to know what, when, where. I’m an absolute sucker for plans and timetables, and if there isn’t one I’ll invent one with neat little timeblocks in different colours - and then rip it all up into tiny pieces and do what I fancy in the moment, instead.
Some things stick
For instance, I always know where I’m going for summer hols - although it takes me ages to choose what to pack as the weather is so very changeable, much like my girth. I look forward to my next summer camping holiday from the moment we pack the tent away back into its bag. This will be our 20th year at the same place, and some (hello mother) would say we’re stuck in a rut. Or perhaps found our little slice of paradise? The answer 100% depends on the Breton weather.
It’s a hard habit to break, not least because we’re now sufficiently established to be written into ‘The Book’, the tome that lives under the reception desk where pitch bookings for the last 60 years have been written - in pen - over a year in advance. Our pitch is booked before we’ve decided we’re going back (who are we kidding, of course we are).
Le Chef, Hubert, has already said, even though he’s now forced to computerise everything for the French tax system, he’s keeping his book and the huge hand-drawn-in-felt-pens plan of mobile home bookings that’s all held together with sellotape. This is the kind of dedication to analogue notebooks and paper scraps that absolutely floats my boat.
But this is a good habit. Even after the agony of choosing what to take, I end up wearing the same thing most days. Sometimes a T-shirt has worn out or I’ve found a more comfortable pair of shorts in the interim, but ultimately we take the same stuff each year or only a very slightly different iteration, with the occasional exciting addition. This year we have a new set of wooden spatulas for stir fries, and a strawberry hulling device for the fabulous Plougastel strawberries.
We turn up, check in, kiss kiss (it’s France after all) and after a brief but hot wrestle with canvas and hoops, we’re the right side of a cold drink and a pizza and it feels we’ve never left. We know how everything works, where everything is, what time everything’s open, and what to do with ourselves. My job is beach and inventing new ways to use the perpetual French beans; his job is cycling and falling asleep in a chair while pretending to read.
Habits and routines are comforting and necessary
For the past two years I’ve got up just after 6am, toasted a bagel, stuck a straw in a smoothie, then done my German Duolingo practice. It’s why I managed to catch up then overtake himself by miles. He’s still talking about farms and report cards, whereas I’ve reached the dizzy heights of Section 5 and the subjunctive. But if I’m out of that routine (perhaps because someone’s left their job, relinquishing their early commute and the need for a maternal shove out the door) then it all goes to pot. Only days before my 1000-day milestone, I forgot my Duolingo twice in a week!
When is a habit a rut?
I recently realised I have other habits, too.
When I go to my stitching group, I make fabric bowls which I don’t need.
When I go on a long car or train journey I take knitting or stitching which I never finish.
and when I go on holiday I take my trusty travelling case of art materials, and always more besides.
Funnily enough, it’s not because I’m one of those people who always has to be doing something, although it can look like that. Nope, it’s because these slivers of time are the only times when I can’t be doing chores or working. Even then, I’ll still check emails. I have a well-established rut where I spend my days thinking about being creative, writing about it, and teaching others to be creative - without actually doing anything creative myself. It’s kind of a worthy rut, a ‘nobody-could-argue-with-this’ rut, but it’s still a rut and I’m in deep. Hence my panic-fuelled attempts to fill the moments when I escape with some arting. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works, the vibe is wrong. I’m then stitching the bowls or knitting things or carrying around art materials because I feel I should.
I try to schedule creative play into my everyday days, but I’m useless at prioritising commitments to myself the way I can with commitments to other people. On the surface, moments when I’m out of my normal rut look like valid moments of ‘spare’ time, and it seems logical to use them. Fair enough to be stitching something while going to my stitching group (makes a change) but when do I let myself enjoy a journey just for the ride, or a chance to relax with a book, or even look vacantly at the passing scenery? When is a holiday just a holiday?
My eyes are bigger than my tummy
It’s like exercising moderation at a buffet in an all-inclusive resort. You’ll never be there again, it’s all delicious, you’ve paid for it. If you don’t at least try a bit of everything now, when will you?
I love wandering on the beach, paddling, looking at seaweed, having a swim and sometimes basking like a seal on a mafia rat reading my book. But I also feel that if I don’t wring every last drop of inspiration out of the place now, draw or paint it all, print with that seaweed, fill a whole book with collages and thumbnails, before I know it I’ll be back in my cramped little room at home looking out over the driveway and the parked cars, thinking about making a start on dinner before checking my emails again. Photos aren’t the same, this is it, now is all I have.
Like piling my plate with everything from a buffet then not being able to finish, I always pack far too many art materials then spend three weeks feeling guilty for not using them all - or have to think of things I could do with them to justify the luggage space it takes to bring them in the first place.
Do what the celebrities do
When celebrities hit the buffers, they check themselves into a locked unit and do a detox. I’m going to give that a go. My rehab venue will be a canvas tent with the feeblest of WiFi, due to its location in the dip of the campsite, so my detox is from the internet, and all the shoulds and oughts (but not the wine, it’s France🍷).
The key thing is to have a change of scene, remove yourself from the context entirely. As Mother always said, it’s impossible to have biscuits in the house because they talk to you from inside the cupboard: the only solution is to not let them over the threshold in the first place. The only way to stop me being on the internet is to take away the internet.
I’m not doing it alone, I’ll have my detox buddy who’s feeling similarly wrung out. We’ve agreed a 5-minute daily dose of WiFi, enough to check on the house elf, maybe do our Duolingo words, but that’s it. We’re going analogue. We’ll take a few things, but neither of us is taking a tower of books to feel guilty about not reading, he’s not taking a stack of notebooks to feel guilty about not writing in, and I’m not taking the contents of my studio to feel guilty about not using. It’ll be tough not sneaking things into the car at the last minute, but I reckon that once there, we’ll survive.
To give you an idea of the sort of stuff I’ve taken before, here’s last year’s post. Scroll down for a video tour of my art bag. If I take anything this summer, it’ll be this with heavily edited contents:
Could you do an internet detox?
I read this book a month or so ago. Verrrry interesting…
Much like Gina Ferrari and her ‘Sunday supplement’ I’ve been writing Threadnoodle for nearly two years now; almost every single week I’ve churned out a lot of words. I’m not going to stop (sorry 😬) but I am going to pause.
I may post a pic or two in notes, if I come across anything particularly bootiful…
Last week, I talked about my autumnal quest for balance, flexibility, and letting go. This week, I’m adding ‘creative play’ to that list. I have a few ideas up my sleeves (if I was wearing any, which I’m not because at the time of writing it’s stifling hot again and I’m not quite by the sea yet). I have a few ideas for what would work and how to make it stick, balancing my craving for freedom and flexibility with the equally strong pull to button everything down into a strict timetable which I then ignore. But I’m not going to think about it right now. Right now, I’m too busy doing this sort of thing…
So that’s me signing myself off for now. I’ll be back in around a month or so. Until then, if you’re in the northern hemisphere I hope you have a lovely summer - and for those in the southern, I hope you stay cosy!
Laters!
I have a lovely picture in my head of a basking seal on a mafia rat. The rat is in a pin stripe suit and fedora, with a violin case under its arm. Looking rather squashed by the seal.
Have fun!