My life is a big red line going from bed, to class, to food, to bed

If you were to create an aerial heatmap of your last several months of time, what would it look like? How would your time be clustered? Would it pulsate around a single hub, burning itself deep into a rut; would it assume the form of a loose red haze, networking out every which way; would it be something in between? My map would be a big, fat, artery tracing a triangle pattern from my house, to class, to food, to home.

Why is this the case? Routine. I find it incredibly easy to draft up a basic itinerary and then follow that come hell or high water. On reflection, our society itself is rather well structured to compel such behavior. From a very young age we are told to always have a plan, and always stick to it.

For me at lest, a single plan never really acts properly to plot out life though. I at one point start doing something for one set of reasons, and then as time quickly passes, the role that thing has in relation to my goals completely changes. The realization that this has happened lags weeks, months, or even years behind an actual change however. I believe that we can attribute the delay to routines being seductively simple to follow, and belligerently hard to break.

Taking the example of walking to class, coming home, reading random blogs and Youtubing, then sleeping, the difficulty of breaking pattern versus the ease of maintaining presents itself. In most cases, I continue to do as I do for the pure reason that it is what I do. Rowing took up four years, which naturally led into college and debate, and I find myself moving forwards as an automatic mechanism, responding to surroundings without considering fully why.

I implicate the internet provide for its absurd ability to entertain in order to explain this lack of 'why'. When trying to unwind from a day, the go-to activity is rarely self consideration, so much as full immersion in stimulating media. While there exists more than enough time to say, go for a walk and think about the state of things, not doing so takes less energy.

Of late I have been making a conscious effort to branch out my heat map, and also consider actively why I am doing what I do. Nothing earthshaking has yet resulted from this pursuit, but at least certain obvious self-suggestions, such as 'stop playing video games for upwards of five daily hours' come quickly to light. I suspect also that even two or three twenty minute periods of free time to reflect will prune out more than their weight of unfortunate choices.

Give it a try; reconsider something that you find to be obvious and central to your life. Why did you begin to participate, why do you do so now, and is this still valuable?