routine and gold duct tape

it's the little things. yesterday it was shiny gold duct tape.  not even close to the typical dull silver duct tape. this was pretty and happy and day-makingly beautiful, especially on a very wet, very rainy day. it looked like Christmas and all the glittering lighty-ness of that.

yesterday the gold tape held up our return to crossfit work out program. it was hard, but it was so good.  to be together. to move our bodies. to get back into the routine of our lives. our lives which are constantly changing, full of motion and newness.  yesterday there were new faces and old faces and in between faces, like ven diagrams, overlapping seasons.

maybe that is why routines matter.  they give us structure and stability and something to depend on. and maybe why they matter even more here. maybe when the years of routine are stripped away and you've landed in a place with out those years of people and sameness, re-creating the patterns brings meaning and sanity.

routine is viewed as boring, monotonous and generally negative.  it's viewed as the opposite of adventure; as suffocating, as destroying the goodness that comes from creativity and spontaneity. but i think they go together.  routine provides us with something essential- a backbone for life- from which we can branch off, we can decorate, we can add our gold tape and little white lights.

i tend to be bad at routine- i tend to not set it up, to avoid it - yet i find that i secretly crave it.  that with out it, i can spin and spin myself dizzy.  with out it, i become lost.  it gives something to both count on, and react to.  it provides the platform from which to sometimes jump. 

now it's wednesday, the middle of the week.  mike and i are jumping.  we are breaking the routine a little. we are just going for lunch and to spend the afternoon working together, but it's special because it's different.  with out the routine, it would be another thing to do.  but today, it's a little gold duct tape.