I’m learning to live around my routines. Or maybe my routines are what I live and everything else that I perceive as life is just moments in between meals, meditation, supplements, treatments, workouts, walks, and pharmaceuticals. Who is to say what forms the contours of life?
When I first picked up the daily commitment to write I struggled to find a topic to write about each day and I would find myself stressed if the end of the day was nearing and I felt I had nothing of value to say. Now I am realizing that having something to say isn’t the point of this daily discipline. It is the persistence that matters. The content is secondary. The knowledge that every day I will write and so I do is what matters. I will exercise the willpower necessary to form my thoughts into words. I will place them in public to prove to myself that I have remained committed. This is like any other aspect of my routine. Breath in and breathe out. Lift the weight. Take the medicine. Write the words.
Daily disciplines bring about breakthroughs. The individual acts maybe don’t matter so much. Some days will be better than others. But persistent effort brings about quality inexorably. It forces a standard of quality that improves at each repetition in some meaningful way even if you cannot see it in that moment. I find the act of creation easier now. It doesn’t feel like a burden. It is nit a source of stress or anxiety. It’s just something I do.