New routines are evolving. Routines have evolved before, and I’m trying to remember whether I was conscious of that at the time or whether I simply let them evolve. Unfold.
I sometimes think about ruts, and I wonder how people get into one and I think to myself, ‘I’d love to find a rut, to know what was happening one day, one week, one year to the next.’
Is it part of getting older this searching for rust and rhythms? Looking for the softness that rhythms brings, the gentleness, the ease. If I were in a rut, I think to myself, I would be able to write the reams that I dream of writing. I would sit for hours and lose myself in words. If I were in a rhythm, I would know when it was time to write.
But that’s just something I tell myself. It’s another, ‘I would be a great writer, if only …’
After four years, nearly five, back in Australia, living in this one place, I do feel the rhythms and routines of the year becoming more sharply defined. Winter leaving, the spring winds springing up behind. Finding my momentum to write my next fringe show, knowing that October is too late to start, but knowing I’ve done it twice before and it all worked out okay.
Most of the rhythms and routines I’ve had in my life have come by accident, just one thing happens and then it happens again and there you are. Going to the market. Watching Insiders. Sewing trips on the Queen’s Birthday weekend (but not this COVID year). And now that I Made an Adult, all I can feel is the spaces where I didn’t get the routines working. The annual trips to this beach. The weekly pizza night. The lunchboxes. And of course, I’m thinking of all the ones I didn’t appreciate enough, didn’t put myself in the moment. How much I hated Saturday sports. Well, all sports really. How bored I was with it.
And as my children grow older, get ready to leave, spend less time with me all the time, I know that my routines will be more clearly mine. That is, unshaped by their needs or wants. I’m looking forward to the things I will be able to do now. The creative projects I will be able to finish. But I’m sad about all of the times we will no longer share. I thought of trying to introduce a routine where we all got together for Saturday breakfast, but then I thought of the cracks in my heart I would have to mend when I was the only one there.