Two Routines

Is having a fairly regular and predictable daily routine beneficial or harmful to the thinking life? The question is unanswerable until we have clearly distinguished between the two relevant kinds of routine.

There is the routine that aims to minimize the distractions of daily life, and then there is the routine that functions as a continuous cycle of distraction. The first entails the automatization of the truly unavoidable practical tasks (eating, sleeping, washing, and so on), such that these recede into little more than an unobtrusive background hum; the second, the superimposition of artificial “needs” upon the time and mental space that might have been occupied with more essential and elevating activities. The first frees up one’s time and energy for the courageous contemplation of divinity, while the second is the soul’s way of evading the exciting isolation of silence and the godlike liberty of slowness in the slavish name of “keeping busy.” The first, in short, is enlivening, in the strictest sense of accentuating the animating principle; the second is ennervating, in that its inevitable trajectory is the habituation of a process of spiritual self-avoidance, until one forgets, caught in the whirlpool of assertive submissiveness, what time and intellect were for.