Bad news for those of us who benefit from all the amazing things routines, discipline and a focus on self-actualisation can bring: Routines are made to be broken. You are supposed to be derailed and distracted. Things are not meant to go as you’d planned.
Your perfectly designed, jealously guarded morning routine is supposed to be turned upside down by the sound of your daughter - awake way earlier than planned - letting you know that she’s ready for your full attention.
It’s good that your planned afternoon of progress on the thing evaporated in favour of enjoying unexpected great weather and an opportunistic picnic on the beach.
Your workout suffered today because you stayed up later than you thought as the conversation got deeper last night? Fantastic.
A conversation with an elderly stranger at the departure gate meant you missed out on reading 10 more pages of your book? Excellent.
It’s absolutely right to prioritise giving everything to be with your friend in crisis at the expense of whatever you had planned for your very important week.
The probability that tomorrow will be less productive because you’re fully present with the people who matter tonight should be celebrated.
Our reliance on the infrastructure for virtue isn’t misplaced. The right routine will transform your life. Working on yourself works. We can all benefit from sticking to positive habits. Discipline is essential to progress… and yet.
Real life happens in the interruptions. The best that life has to offer may be enabled by the scaffolding of discipline, routine, and commitment to self-improvement and self-actualisation, but it is not found in it. A good life, as we’ve collectively known for a long time, is built on connection with others, on purpose, on meaning.
The truly nourishing, exciting, engaging, invigorating living happens with other people. It happens in shared moments laughing, crying, learning and navigating. Sometimes simply being. Even the fruits of our solo struggles taste so much sweeter shared with the people that matter.
In the excellent An Existential Guide to: Making Friends, the author writes “If you need a rule, take this one: honour the interruptions. Friendship is an interruption of yourself by the world and of the world by yourself. If nothing interrupts you, you are not living; you are a screensaver. Go be interrupted. Go be available to be changed.”
Friendship is an interruption. A beautiful interruption, and there are many more like it. Bids for attention from family and friends, unexpected opportunities, getting lost in a creative pursuit, finding flow in a hobby, serendipity.
A focus only on our own rigid, planned self-realisation at the expense of these beautiful interruptions is self-absorbed. We know by now that this is not the recipe for a happy life. Beautiful interruptions interrupt us from ourselves. They pull us out of the whirlpool of self-absorption.
Good habits and routines matter, especially if you want to live a full life. “There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision” writes William James. The more we turn our good intentions into habit, “the more our higher powers of mind will be set free” for the really important things in life. Those that achieve big things rarely get there by accident. Progress takes effort and discipline.
But if we want to make progress while actually living, we need to find balance. We need to use the scaffolding to allow us to live life as fully as possible, not let it rule us. The scaffolding should be strong, but not make us brittle.
We need to be thoughtful in sorting between the beautiful interruptions and the rest, and between the essential and the non-essential scaffolding.
For those of us that thrive on habit and routine, there may be ways for us to embrace the beautiful interruptions without anxiety.
We can protect the lower bounds of our habits and routines and - for the right interruptions - not be so hung up on the upper bounds. Less sleep, not no sleep. Less movement, not no movement. Less work, not no work.
We can zoom out on our timescales. We can commit to repairing any perceived damage - catching up on sleep after late nights, re-jigging workout plans for the rest of the week, make time later for working on the project.
We can be fully present for both parts of life - the important routine and the fulfilling beautiful interruptions. We can avoid souring our moment-to-moment experience of living by worrying about what we’re not doing. We can try and learn from Montaigne; “When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep”.
To live a truly great life, presence is more important than perfection. We need to remember that the scaffolding exists only to help us live our lives to the fullest. We need to build a riverbank wide enough to let currents meander and the river of life to find its course. We can let our routines be strong, but our grip on them be light so that we are ready to answer when real life calls.