Monotony is bliss

There is something to be said for the routine, for the usual, for the comfortable. I mean, most of the time in life you've heard your friends tell you to step outside your confort zone, or your parents told you that there's nothing to be afraid of, or your high school teacher told you to just give it a try. "What the heck?" runs through your head, somehow you build up your nerve and you do something you've never done before. And that's all well and good and very important.

But you know, sometimes it's important to recognize the routine. We spend our lives passing through the day-to-day, getting it done because it's meant to get done, falling into line with our schedules and our plans and our stress. But when does the routine become the routine? When do your new classes become your classes, when does your new workout schedule become your regular workout, when does life cross into that line of boring regularity? Maybe that's why so many of us find ourselves at a point where we've just grown tired, where the new classes each quarter have just become the new quarter, which in turn has become just another quarter. And it doesn't matter where you go to school or how much you were in love with the place when you got there, at some point it becomes routine, life gets boring. I mean, heck, I went to Paris. "What the heck?" I thought. Why not?

And perhaps it was a good decision. Perhaps it was the best experience of my life. But eventually the new and the exciting has to end and you have to return to the routine. I dreaded that return, I thought that I would become exceedingly bored again and never be able to see Stanford in the same light. Everyone goes through that, everyone does change the way they see Stanford (even if they stayed on campus). Nothing new, nothing original. The hard part, however, is getting through it. The hard part is realizing that no matter how menial and how tedious the routine can get, it was at one point exciting and new and it always has potential to be just as exciting and just as new (and just as shiny) again.

The point, I guess, of this entire rant is that allowing the routine to get you down is not really worthwhile. It's important to throw some variety in there, yes, but to always accept that the routine is the starting point. It may be menial and it may be boring, but it's only a routine for a little while. And once it's gone, you're going to miss it, so why not cherish it while you can? What the heck? Why not get enjoyment out of classes and have fun going to the gym. I mean, in the end it's not about chores and about tediousness. In the end, it's your routine, the one you chose, because at some point way back when as a naive and uncertain seventeen-year-old you thought it was the right thing to do.

I guess I'll just stick it out. I've never left anything unfinished, and there's no reason to start now. I miss Paris, I loved my time there, but it's time to get back to life, until I go back and find newness in everything around me again.