Routines are GROOVY, man!

Watching the sun rise and set are a glorious, age-old routines to incorporate into your life.

This is the story of how I lost and got my groove back!

After a long summer without blogging due to various circumstances, I’m back now with a vengeance and a backlog of great material and photos to share (which I may post date to fill in where I planned for them to originally go). Your ReBegin blog is a splendid weekly routine for me to adhere that helps me track my artistic progress and serve as a warm up for other projects during the week. I find my creative spirits are bolstered when I have completed the task and shared appropriately with the blog-o-verse (and those whom I am very grateful for taking the time to read). Because I went through (and in ways still am going through) an upheaval both physically with a move and emotionally with a challenging break-up, I found my creative routines disrupted. However, it is high time to get back in the groove, and with each sentence that forms I can feel my creative soul breathing a sigh of relief. AH!

I’ve always struggled to maintain a routine, not because I hate them, but because a freelancer’s life is constantly in flux, especially when travel is involved.  I actually love the concept of holding and having regular routines that occur around the same time daily. Routines / regular rituals serve as a sort of linchpin for all other activities to revolve around. Of course when circumstances force me to alter a routine in some way, I am definitely left feeling unhinged. Something in the Universe just isn’t right without them.  

AHA, I just found it very interesting to consider how routines fit into the concepts of Your ReBegin and ReEvolutionary. Because each day/season/etc begins again, re-evolving upon the axis of a singular steady element that remains the same, but allows for variation around it. For example: our solar system has the Sun. Without it we would be set adrift in the cosmos, incapable of sustaining life. And yet as we make our daily rotation and yearly revolution around the sun, we go through vast changes, but look forward to similar routines and elements that occur yearly during those spins. For something to change, something must also remain fixed to give guidance.

Whether lasting for five minutes or several hours, routines and regular rituals steady and ground our creative spirits, which unmanaged can float all over the place unfocused. You can metaphorically think of routines as the string that holds on to our creative spirit kite. It helps to tether it, giving it something to pull on / offer resistance. The string allows it to flow in the wind, but not go adrift where it may crash into a tree, thus ending it’s flight. We want our creativity to keep soaring! Routines help create structure and give direction. Little daily and weekly rituals and routines help our minds establish internal rhythms and give a time reference for events. They also gift a sense of accomplishment upon their completion. They are little confidence boosters cheering on our larger endeavors.  Our brains do well with a healthy balance of routine and variation, and for each person the equation is different.

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION
Take some time to examine your own routines and regular rituals. Which do you enjoy doing, and which seem like such a pain? Which ones are connected to your creative spirit — take some time to determine the difference between a daily chore/routine (like brushing your teeth) and a creative one (like humming a song every time you brush your teeth). Which ones give you a sense of accomplishment? Which ones seem to feel good, but really just drain your energy and don’t serve you artistically? Which ones are missing? Which ones can you experiment with adding into your schedule? Start off with simple, short routines. A little can go a long way towards fulfilling its purpose!

I can just feel the inspired rays of light shining down as I complete this blog.