Routine

Okay, for someone who likes stability, I’m, um… starting to get annoyed with all this fucking routine.

Look, the hotel here is great. Seriously. The staff are amazing. The hotel is what it is. It’s a small town in a small area; you get what survives. And they’ve made this place work. I’m not complaining.

Shit, I am though, huh?

It’s time.

In life, yes, I accept the grind. I accept the routine. But if you are one of the few people I have let into my life, you know this: I fucking hate routine.

I am always looking for variety. I’m always looking for spice. I always want to do something today that I didn’t do yesterday. I seek out new restaurants. New coffee shops. New views. New roads. It’s what I fucking do.

It took decades of doctors harping on me before I finally got halfway decent about taking my daily medicine. I still fucking suck at diabetes, and that is something that should be pretty goddamned routine.

But, you know. Kate.

When it comes to my townhome, yeah, I guess I tolerate a little more permanence. But I rent. For exactly that reason. Every four or five years, I pack all my shit and find somewhere new to live. I grant a little more permanence to my living quarters because, frankly, moving is fucking expensive. First, last, and deposit, plus boxes, tape, trucks, help, and all the other bullshit that comes with relocating your entire life.

But here I have sat in the same hotel, in the same room, for more than five days.

And the only thing that has made sitting still this long not just tolerable, but wonderful, is that I’ve gotten to spend it with my wife. I’ve gotten to spend it with Dawna.

So that leaves my soul in a weird fucking place.

I am amazingly satisfied and full from spending this much quality time with the love of my life, while simultaneously feeling anxious as hell because I have been sitting still for too long.

Those things shouldn’t make sense together.

But they do.

And before anyone tries to call me out, yes, I go to fucking work every day. Same fucking job. Same fucking building. A lot of the same fucking things.

But let’s not confuse responsibility with an acceptance of stagnation. Because it’s fucking not.

The things that make my workdays worthwhile are the amazing people I get to lead and, quite frankly, the motorcycle ride to and from work. The rest? Pretty fucking routine.

Which, as you now know, I fucking hate.

There are people who crave routine. People who need to start each morning with exactly the same procedural steps. People who find comfort in knowing today will look remarkably similar to yesterday.

I have never fucking understood them.

At all.

Because I don’t find comfort in sameness. I find comfort in movement.

Give me a road I haven’t ridden. A restaurant I haven’t tried. A town I’ve never seen. A conversation I wasn’t expecting. Give me something that makes me nervous. Give me something I don’t already know how to do.

Give me tomorrow, but for fuck’s sake, don’t make it look exactly like yesterday.

And yet, there’s something I’ve had to admit about these last few days.

For all my bitching about sitting still, apparently I haven’t been nearly as stagnant as I thought.

Yesterday morning, Dawna was asleep. It had been a late night, and I didn’t want to wake her, so I grabbed my computer and went downstairs to the hotel breakfast area. I sat there with my coffee and opened Undertow.

I’ve been avoiding that fucking manuscript.

Not the writing. The writing is done. What I’ve been avoiding is the final pass, the tedious, mind-numbing part where I go through every story, every paragraph, every sentence, every fucking word and decide whether it still belongs there.

Does the structure make sense? Does this story fit the larger arc of the collection? Do I still agree with that word choice? Is the tempo right? Does that sentence land where I want it to land? Does the ending still do what I thought it did when I wrote it?

It is incredibly detailed work.

It is incredibly boring work.

And it has to fucking happen.

Because before I hand Undertow off to a proofreader, cover designer, and interior book designer, I need to know that I like everything about every fucking story in it. Not that it's perfect. I don't believe anything we create ever really reaches perfect. But I need to know that when I finally push this thing out into the universe, it is the book I intended to write.

Whatever excuses I’d been using to avoid that final step apparently didn't survive hotel breakfast.

I put my fucking head down and burned through the first four stories.

Four.

Sitting in the same fucking hotel that has had me climbing the walls because I feel like I haven't been moving.

There’s some irony for you.

Because maybe movement isn't always measured in miles.

Sometimes you're sitting in a Holiday Inn breakfast area while the woman you love sleeps upstairs, drinking hotel coffee and agonizing over whether one fucking sentence still belongs in a story you wrote months ago.

And you're moving.

Maybe even farther than you realize.

To me, too much routine starts feeling like captivity. Like getting trapped inside a moment instead of experiencing the full breadth of what life has to offer.

And that is a goddamned tragedy.

Because we are put on this earth to experience living. To explore. To feel. To learn. To grow. To figure out what scares the shit out of us and then, occasionally, walk straight toward it anyway.

We are here to become more than we ever thought we could be.

Maybe that's why motorcycles have always made so much fucking sense to me. You can ride the same road a hundred times, and it will never be exactly the same ride. The temperature changes. The wind changes. The light changes. The traffic changes.

You change.

And maybe that's what I've been getting wrong about this hotel room.

For five days, I've barely moved.

But Dawna and I are preparing to start a new life together. I've spent uninterrupted time with the woman I love. I've picked up a book I'd been avoiding and started the final march toward publication.

My surroundings have been stagnant.

But I haven't.

Maybe permanence isn't the same thing as stagnation after all.

Maybe stability isn't either.

Maybe the trick isn't avoiding routine.

Maybe it's making sure that wherever you plant your feet, you're still willing to fucking move.

To borrow from an admittedly overquoted piece of pop culture: This is the way.