Lately I’ve been ruminating on the idea of accidental consistency. I’ve been noticing areas in my life where I unconsciously make the same set of choices over and over and over again. And it honestly kind of started to freak me out. Here’s a list of a few instances lately where I’ve found myself being a little too consistent:
-the order of operations in which i wash my body (and am unable to wash it in any other order)
-turning to the left outside my parents house every time i walk our dog (never the path to the right)
-greeting my students with the same catchphrases in the same cadence of voice over and over again every single week
Retroactively catching myself in a repetition has always me feel stuck, like I’m living in a simulated time loop, predestined to a cyclical performance of my own creation. But it’s not consistency itself I’m afraid of. I recently started telling my students, “practice makes progress,” as opposed to “practice makes perfect,” because I do believe in intentional repetition for the sake of growth. But unconscious repetition to the point of stagnation born out of a lack of energy to make intentional creative choices with my life freaks me out.
The thing that started all of this was being in bed for a week with covid and feeling something more than just an haziness from being cooped up in a dark room with a stuffy nose and a headache for five days. It’s the fear that I felt when watching the bee movie and Barry realizes that he has to choose one bee job for the rest of his entire life until he dies. It’s the feeling I got in the Truman Show when Truman realized that his entire happy go lucky life was completely controlled and simulated. It’s the feeling when the topic of heaven was brought up in Sunday school, and it was described as a place where there’s no more sadness or diseases, a place where we live in harmony except the days never stop and time never ends. A vivid image came to my mind as a little kid of a carousel. When something that’s supposed to be fun and playful keeps going around in cycles forever and ever and you can never get off, it turns into something deeply unsettling. Eternity turns into repetition and repetition turns into boredom and boredom turns into nothingness. It’s this deeper question that I’ve felt since I was a little kid when thinking about what happens next, and next, and next, and next, and next until the word next doesn’t feel like a word anymore and that also feels like nothing. But how do we notice the patterns and stop them before they turn into nihilism? What if consistency doesn’t automatically equal stuckness? What if it doesn’t all spiral from there?
What’s interesting to me right now is noticing patterns in my routine and wondering how I can create a disruption. How can I break out of the performance of brushing my teeth? Should I try holding the toothbrush with my non-dominant hand? Should I try brushing in zig zags instead of circles even though the dentist told me to do circles? Why do I have to do circles? What do circles do to my gum health that zig zags can not? How can I help someone else break out of a performative cycle of patterns? How will I listen to a story my friend is telling and ask non-practiced follow up questions? One of my favorite performance pieces is by Miranda July, called Friends and Strangers. She brings a roll of toilet paper to a gas station, walks around and asks people at various pumps to hold a section of the paper. Eventually she’s created a maze of toilet paper, relying upon faith that each stranger involved will comply to this arbitrary task she’s appointed them. She’s taken a mundane situation and asked people to wake up a little and question how they’re operating through mundanity in relation to each other.
One of my favorite quotes by Miranda July says, “Remember that you are absolutely free! What is really interesting? What do you want to do today? And what else might you do?” I love this quote because it reminds me that in an age of increasingly artificial, performative and automated aspects of our world, we are the one thing that will always change, that will never be stuck. We always have the power to disrupt our patterns of accidental consistency.
exercises to try-
-brush your teeth with your non-dominant hand
-consciously take extra long steps
-provide exact change