Repetition and routine

And a little bit of complaining about slc

I take a 30-minute walk at roughly the same time every morning and roughly the same time every evening, not because I want to but because if I don’t my dog becomes demanding and unmanageable. Otis doesn’t care if I’m in the mood for a walk and Otis rules my life with an iron paw, so we go. We take basically the same route every day. We walk in a big rectangle — three blocks by eight blocks (or so) in either direction — and pass the same houses day in day out. We do this regardless of weather or how light or dark it is outside.

We’ve lived in neighborhoods in the past that have offered more variety for daily walks. The scenery might change dramatically if you go left versus right at an intersection. Maybe one route would take us to a park and the other to the lakefront or a winding, circuitous trail system. But right now we live in Salt Lake City, a city known first for the Mormons but a surprising number of people back home have also asked me about its orderly grid system. And it is orderly, but like…in a hostile way. It’s a weird place to live. 

Even though it’s built on a grid with very few disruptions, I still get lost. It’s built around the temple; all streets in either direction start at 100 and increase in number the further away you get from the temple. You would think this is fairly straightforward, but it just doesn’t compute for my brain. My mind goes blank when I’m given an address like “179 W 900 S” or “2011 1100 E”. I have no way of knowing where in the city I’ll end up or if the place I’m looking for is on an East-West street or a North-South street. I would be lost without GPS. When I have to give my address to someone out of state on the phone there’s inevitably a moment of confusion, when they think they heard me wrong and I have to assure them they have it right. 

Coming from Milwaukee, with its luscious lakefront and extensive park system, Salt Lake City feels barren to me. It’s sunbaked and uninviting. It’s hazy and dusty and too fucking hot. It’s a desaturated place. Everywhere you look it’s beige and tan and gray. It’s rock and sprawling concrete. Paint gets baked off and fades and peels, even on cars. The color green signals an inordinate and irresponsible use of water. Overall I’ve found it a very uninspiring place to live. Like you have to try a little harder to bring color to your life, in every sense.

Depending on which route we take on our walk, I can sometimes look down at the valley and see a yellowish haze sitting over the city. The semi-weekly news stories about how the lake is drying up and the wind is picking up all the heavy metals in the lake bed — like antimony, copper, zirconium, and arsenic — and blowing them around come to mind. I look down at the yellow haze and realize I’m probably breathing that all in. I swallow and wonder if I can taste it; I sniff and wonder if I can smell it. I have to look away and stop thinking about it. 

When we go home for a visit, one of the first things we notice is that we can smell the water in the air. I didn’t realize how much I missed it until that first trip back. I inhaled and felt myself relax on a cellular level. Last time we were home we just sat at the lake and took it in, filling our inner reservoir with the sight and sound and smell of it. Coming back from our most recent trip we realized this place would never be home and got serious about planning our next move.

But this isn’t about me not liking Salt Lake City. This is about how I’m learning to appreciate the repetition and simplicity of our daily walks. I estimate that by this point Otis and I have logged nearly 1,000 hours in walks around the grid of our neighborhood. I know every house and yard and building we’ll pass. I know all the spots he’ll stop to sniff at and pee on. But back in June, this boring, monotonous chore managed to surprise me. The flowers bloomed.

It seemed everyone in our neighborhood had rose and peony bushes in every color you can imagine. A handful of wisteria trees on our route bloomed and when you passed you could hear what sounded like hundreds of bees buzzing around, hard at work. The flowers are all long dead now and the lavender bushes are losing their scent, but for those few weeks our routine turned into something delightful. As we head into fall the trees and bushes on our path are starting to change color again. Another brief window of surprising beauty.

The whole thing got me thinking about routine and repetition and cycles in general. I used to teach yoga and meditation and still maintain my own practice. Honestly I got into it for misguided reasons, having some food and body image issues to work through. It helped me do that mostly by getting me to gradually understand that the way my body looked or what it was capable of wasn’t really the goal. The practice itself was the goal. The boring ins and outs of routine. The consistency. The doing of the thing even when you’d rather not, even when you don’t see the point, even when you feel like things are moving backward not forward.

I think back to when the pandemic first started and how my daily routine ground to a halt. At the time I was working at a library full time, commuting 45 minutes each way, and teaching 5–7 yoga classes a week on top of that. I didn’t have much down time and I didn’t have a real need for a structured routine, it was just kind of baked in. But then that all changed. I left that job, I quit drinking, I stopped teaching, we didn’t really leave the apartment for months, and then we moved to a new city where we only knew a couple people. Suddenly, I had a lot of free time and routine became very important. Routine became about meaning making. This isn’t anything new. I feel like I’m finally understanding what all the talk about cultivating gratitude and maintaining a mindfulness practice is all about. I’m late to that party. 

So back to the flowers and our walks. It got me thinking — so I find this city uninviting…so what? The city isn’t going to change, so if I’m going to do anything other than waste my time here, that means something about my approach to it has to change. Maybe there’s a way I can see it as a challenge. Can I be curious in an environment I find so boring? Creative in a space I find uninspiring?

One of the most common reasons people say they don’t meditate is that they don’t have time — they’re too busy and too distracted. Well, I thought, I’ve got nothing but time and limited distractions here. Maybe this is an invitation to set my meditation practice to intermediate mode (not that it really works like that, or maybe it does, what do I know?) and take it off my cushion.

And so I’ve been working on it. Paying closer attention and noticing moments throughout the day that pique my curiosity or make me smile. (If you follow me on Instagram the snails and bumper stickers I post stem from this.) I have moments where my effort falters and I sigh and admit, I *hate* this place, and find myself relating to Agent Smith’s monologue in The Matrix, but just like the flowers and trees that started this whole thing, it’s a lesson in impermanence. We won’t be here forever — in the specific, SLC-sense and in the bigger, being-alive sense — so it’s really on me to appreciate what I can while I can. I won’t get a do-over so I might as well try to enjoy it the first time.

Repetition, routine, monotony. They can be total killers if you let them. But if we pay close enough attention, we notice the slight variations at play. It’s not flashy, but it’s something. And for now that’ll have to be good enough.

Weekly Otis

I mean…