A Resilient Routine: Repetitive Processes on Purpose

More and more, I have what I need and know where to find it, freeing up my Fridays to fill as I wish. More and more, I am spending them as I would on a Wednesday.

As I edit What Could Be, what surprises me is how much I forgot in a year. Without these pages, I’d be lost if I had to explain how I got from there to here.

With distance, I can remember what I was trying to say and find a better way to say it, but without the notes, I would have drawn a blank.

I transformed from a frustrated, depressed, lonely, exhausted, difficult-to-employ, angry young woman I was to the happy, retired hermit I am today. The conditions are almost exactly the same, but the way I feel about them is entirely different.

How did I change my feelings? I couldn’t answer that now, but as I edit What Could Be, I can’t help but think, “Oh, yeah!”

When those experiments worked, I created repetitive processes and moved on. I kept notes, thank goodness.

When they didn’t work, I am grateful for the training of a process engineer to figure out which part needed tweaking and for the courage of someone who had no one watching to try again.

There’s power in being comfortable being alone. Not a shame, as was the lesson I absorbed. I did the experiment and gathered the proof that yes, there’s a power in being comfortable being alone. It’s another thing to be self-sufficient while doing it, as the show Alone proves, but simply to take in your own company without inventing a Wilson is a skill on which you can always rely.

Welcoming Silence

I know that I couldn’t always take the silence. My repetitive processes for studying included heavy rock tunes to tune out the voices in my head that said I would fail, and, worse. I loaded my stereo and turned up the volume.

My older sister was comfortable with silence, and exam times were battle zones that a good pair of weightless wireless headphones could have avoided. Isn’t technology great?

Today, I know that someone’s inability to sit still is a red flag of denial. I knew a few people who were in active denial and couldn’t sit still long enough to study. I had to prepare for studying by going for a long, hard run. Exhaustion, to force myself to sit there and study.

An inability to deal with silence is also a red flag that there’s something you know to be true and are attempting to drown it out. It’s not difficult to stop the grown-up version of the three-year-old who sticks their fingers in their ears and shouts. They close their eyes too, refusing to see what’s there.

Then, you try to sleep at night, and there’s the silence. You claim to have difficulty sleeping, when really that’s the only time you’ve left for the messages to filter through, and it’s those messages that are keeping you awake.

What worked for me was writing it down, with pen and paper. Just tell me, and I’ll make a note, and then you can stop reminding me. That was the deal, and according to science and this waitress with a perfect memory that consistently was wiped clean after the usefulness of the knowledge passed, we know it’s a thing.

So, keep reminding yourself, or you can write it down.

Following Feelings

If you can’t sit in silence, sit with the white page, and follow the words that want to come out. Don’t fight meditation; fight how you characterize and label the effort to get comfortable with silence.

Listening to angry music to get comfortable with silence says a lot about what is in that silence – anger.

There’s a resonance between what we feel and how we choose. To make better choices, fill your heart with love before you make them. That’s the easy answer, but the trick is knowing what love is supposed to feel like.

If you’ve had experiences like mine, you might confuse fear and love, and fear-based decisions create survival-oriented repetitive processes.

You might have to work through what is resonating with you. Where did that feeling originate, when that memory first began?

If that was what you are feeling, why?

Professionally, I know that you are supposed to ask why five times. With experience, I know that the first question has more than one answer. You have the beginnings of a spiderweb that can take months to unravel.

Usually, investigating for months before doing anything is out of the question. Action, now, a leader demands.

It’s the stockholders who want to know what the investment’s return looks like. They want to check in every 4 months. That’s your time limit.

In my life, my anger took decades to resolve.

Further, it’s not enough to know why you are angry about it; you have to get to a place of peace with it.

Often, it requires taking action that you weren’t strong enough, smart enough, or trained enough to do the first time around.

Redefining Limits

But now you are.

No? Time is going to pass anyway, so one day you will be. You may not be angry; you may be sad; frustrated – the first difficult part is feeling it fully enough to call it a name.

You have access to resources, including the ability to make a plan. A good plan, based in reality, vetted by experts, crafted with careful consideration, is what you need.

Polish that plan. And one day you will both feel ready and be ready.

I’ve heard it said that God only gives you what you can tolerate. I took it to mean that God will burden you up to your limits, but no more, so if you feel burdened, be glad you are still alive.

Today, I interpret it differently. I think the universe bestows upon you as much wisdom as you can take, and sadly, no more. Your limits are recognized and respected.

The difference is in seeing difficult times as hardships that you endured, or experiences that taught you valuable and unique lessons. People who haven’t been there, done that simply cannot comprehend.

It’s simply beyond their limits.

Become easy to teach and get the big lessons out of the small things, or you can wait until the small things become big things.

Learner’s choice. Were you gifted or burdened, and you can’t lie to yourself. You actually have to think of the lesson and feel gratitude. Think of things like, “Thank God, I learned always to wear my seatbelt.” That’s genuine gratitude, and the call was close, but some don’t learn the lesson.

Be teachable.

Be gifted.

All good students study. To study is to review and ask: what have we learned?

What did we learn today, in this routine, in all our routines? What do we need to remember for next time, for a better next time?

Meditation presents these lessons to you with clarity and truthfulness. Journaling helps you discover them, too. They become apparent when you have the patience and peace to let them come out. I ran from them; I drowned them out; I did many things until there was nothing left to do but accept the facts as they were laid bare instead of the dogma I had absorbed through life.

You keep at it, all and any method that works for you to discover the lessons, because in each of the repetitive processes, each time through builds on the last one, and you have yourself a resilient routine.

Thank God, I learned to mind my words, tune my vocabulary, feel my body, and many other skills I thought were basic, and as I’ve learned, some people are born that way. Others of us have to work at learning it, but you will, like riding a bike.

Skin a knee, maybe, but then you learn basic first aid. Failure is the refusal to reflect with adequate attention and curiosity on an experience to withdraw the lesson, not a label associated with the inability to have had things turn out your way, just the inability to learn from it.

Then, reckon your new skill, for not everyone learns first aid, and there might be a need for someone with that specific skill set you learned to step up, for yourself, or for your loved ones, or for everyone.

Personal Lessons

Wisdom from experience is the personal lessons in life, and these are only mine.

As I’ve said, I might have done all of this work only to save myself, and if so, that would be selfish. But at least I didn’t expect someone else to do it, and die waiting. When I first started dating my boyfriend, his mother gave me a hammock stand for my birthday. She explained, “I saw that you had a hammock, and if you were waiting for him to help you hang it, you would die waiting.”

I thought, well, you only gave him two weeks.

I could have given him a couple more, but now we’ll never know.

I’ve met women who have never had to wait an hour. I’ve admired women like Sarah Richardson who build empires around taking the lead.

Your life lessons are all your own, and there are fundamental lessons in life and ones that you have to keep at before you can extract a pearl of wisdom that few would have arrived at. Few would have put in the time, few would have built on the repetitive processes, and few would have the ability to separate instructions from natural talent, thus rendering them unable to share the lesson for the rest of us.

But it only takes one to make it through and show the rest of us that it’s possible.

What was the key to that first-timer’s success? You need to know because with all personal lessons, there’s no one to copy, no one to follow, no one who has gone before you.

To know yourself, what you are capable of, based on a truthful and factual analysis of the proof of experience. It’s the sum product of many personal lessons.

Programmed Routines

It wasn’t until I was in university that the internet took hold in my life. When I was a kid, we had a TRS-80, upon which I’d learned to code basic games like Ping-Pong. Many families didn’t have one, and when I’d asked my frugal father why he thought it was essential to get one, he said, “I don’t know.”

To code is to write a resilient routine. It’s merely a series of steps, and once in a while, there’s a question at an intersection. Knowing how to frame the main line, the loops, and the questions was all there was to it, and it turned out to be a fundamental skill for coding, yes, but also for living life. In life, you need to know when to follow the mainstream and when to take the side loop.

The art of the question still rules today when Google has all your answers, and AI is at your service. Yet, I have to remember to ask Google first.

Recently, the dryer stopped producing heat. With groans, we calculated the effort to remove the old one and install the new one. After the groans, I launched YouTube, and ten minutes later, someone was off to fetch a multimeter.

Fifteen minutes after that, a part was ordered on Amazon. A few days later, the dryer was back in business, and it wasn’t yet laundry day. It was a much cheaper, less wasteful, faster, and more straightforward solution than the old way, and we old folks might take some reminding to learn it.

Check Google for answers, because lots of other people have been there too, and they might have some mistakes to show you how to avoid. At least learn where the repetitive processes exist, so you are prepared with what to expect.

Purposeful Reasons

Now that we think of ourselves as appliance-repair people, we’ve used the same repetitive processes to save the electric range and the furnace.

When life presents you with a change to the status quo, you can greet it as a chance to learn or as an upset to your apple cart.

If you are already calculating the cost and pain of returning to the status quo as we used to do, then you are chasing your apples. Instead, it might be there to save you from something worse, or maybe an opportunity to learn something that you’ll need later.

There are all kinds of reasons that life puts a lesson in your path. When you fight it, it lasts longer and gets bigger than it needs to be. When you surrender and accept, it often revels the opportunity or at least shrinks to a manageable size.

Simply adopting the attitude that there is meaning to be found in adversity is the key to the emotional intelligence you need to get through it. To find the calm and peace that this will pass, and the end of the tunnel is where the light beckons you.

The meaning in adversity is the lesson to think differently than before. Remember that lesson until it is ingrained and becomes the new status quo, the new default way of being.

The future brings new lessons. New lessons involving power tools, when renovations are tricky to navigate, and trust is hard to build. New lessons involving collaborations, when design ideals are tricky things to negotiate and agree.

But we’ve grown before, and we can do it again. With any new skill, the next becomes easier, because learning itself is a process – one that should never be forgotten, grow rusty, or get old.