The Hidden Beauty of Routine

Imagine this, your hair is perfectly done, your outfit sleek, your perfume wafting deliciously as you enter a room..you appear exactly as you want to in the public eye, and so, satisfied you walk around mingling, eyes sparkling as you make small talk because you’re happy- after all, you appear exactly how you want to. But what if I told you that your habits are revealing more about you than anything you choose to show visually? 

In fact, it’s one of the first few things I’ve started to notice about myself, and others. How what we do behind closed doors, actually shows up quite loudly in our lives. How they speak for us, whether or not we notice. It slips through in our behaviour, in our thoughts and of course, in our actions-because the truth is no amount of primping can hide the reality of your daily routine. 

For a lot of my life, I prided myself on being a spontaneous person. I did what I felt like, when I felt like. I enjoyed the freedom of it, and while I didn’t necessarily hate schedules I found myself baffled by people who seemed tied to them. Yet over the last few years, I’ve noticed myself more drawn to the structure of routine. Of discipline. Because I realized that it is the one area of life that nobody can fake (no matter how hard they try). 

You spend your free time scrolling? It shows in the conversations you bring up when socializing. You don’t eat well? It shows in your lack of energy and tiredness all the time. You procrastinate until the last minute? You show up late everywhere. You haven’t made progress in your goals? You choose to prioritize everything else first.

Everywhere I look I realize we reveal our private habits and struggles to the world in this way. And while some people may find that scary, I have always found the hard truths to be incredibly motivating.

The thing about routines is they require discipline, and discipline is something you can see in people without them having to utter a word. It is incredibly sexy. But it isn’t trendy or widely recommended to others because after all, it’s not something you can just buy online. That’s what makes it so impressive, discipline is something you build and choose every day. And no one likes to hear about it, because it’s boring.

Which is interesting because we know that boring is where the magic happens, even if it’s the part in films that usually gets rushed in movie montages so you can hurry and see the final result. But this is real life, and it doesn’t have a cut scene, so you need to make room for boring every single day and start embracing the predictability of it.

It all goes back to discipline, which is something that seems to go hand in hand with routine. You can’t have one without the other evidently (a sort of chicken and egg situation) and that’s something important to keep in mind. For me anyway, because that’s the journey I’ve been falling in love with lately.

The process of building my own routine. Choosing it carefully according to all my goals.The beauty of making the same choices every day, of seeing the results of slow repetition instead of quick fixes all while trying to figure out where the heck discipline actually comes from. I don’t have the answers yet, so that topic will have to be for another time, but don’t worry, I’ll add it to the schedule.