Break a Routine

Transcript

I want to talk to you about a few things. One of them is breaking a routine. I was looking through my instagram feed and I found this post from 2018:

On the train to Sydney, on my way to Europe. It’s going to be an adventure… I’m going to make it an adventure.

Something I’ve been thinking about lately, so many chance things happen to us, especially while traveling… Decide to leave a town a few days early, and you happen to meet a new friend who becomes a friend for life – how could such an important thing come down to luck? How could our life be affected so much by random coincidences? Looking back with the meaning created from unrelated events lets us wonder if they were related after all.

There’s a story told in Zen Buddhism. A man has a series of favourable and unfavourable events, losing his horses, having the horses return with brumbies, the brumby breaking his son’s arm, his son avoiding the draft because he’s injured. At each juncture he is congratulated or commiserated for his fortune and he responds, “Good or bad, who is to say?” sometimes we don’t know what is really good for us.

In “Impro”, Keith Johnstone describes the exercise of beginning a common routine, such as breaking an egg, then disrupting the #routine, by finding a baby dragon inside, for example. A story begins with a break in routine. As my friend Shamus says, every movie can be summed up in three words: something goes wrong. So is your lot a misfortune? Or is it merely the beginning of a story?

In “Mr. Nobody”, the main character tells us many conflicting versions of his life, leaving the interviewer confused about which path he really took. Mr. Nobody tells us that whichever path he took, it would have been filled with just as much meaning. That’s not a justification for making a bad decision, but it does emphasise the freedom we have to make a Bob Ross canvas of life and meaning – no mistakes, only happy accidents. I know I can play my attitude like an instrument, I know I can choose how to respond to things, I can look for meaning and find it. Bad eventually appears good, tough times we soon see as the best times. What I really believe is that when things seem unrelated, they are related.

Subtly the Spirit Seamstress Sews. Heaven has a plan for us.

So I wondered about this especially about the part from Keith Johnstone. I was thinking about this morning about how so many of us will be in a routine and then the routine is broken and we think “how could this happen, how could this situation defy my expectations?”

But really that’s a good thing and that’s where the story begins. That’s why so many times in a story as in the hero’s journey. First begins ordinary life, then comes the call to adventure, then the refusal of adventure and finally the first act of acceptance of call to adventure.

Its interesting to think about this, just as when we look at history when we look at it through this phrase or lens of the higeleon dialectic where there’s a cultural thesis that is a strong prevalent idea a concept which guides the culture, a resistance to it and finally some kind of fusion of the thesis and antithesis resolving in synthesis.

When we look at history through this lens, when I look at modern events through this lens I start to think there isn’t so much to worry about after all. The system is always seeking balance or seeing equilibrium as we say in economics.

Theres always a constant process and our lives we look at it through the lens of the hero’s journey seeing that a break in routine is merely the beginning of a story. We don’t need to worry so much.

Things change, something goes wrong and there’s a break in the routine and that is where our story begins, not where our story ends. That’s our mistake to think our story is ending because things are changing.

That is opportunity, challenge, adventure. That’s what happens when we break a routine.