I’m on a Zoom call in supervision but finding it hard to concentrate because out of my window, I’m watching a car trying to get around the corner by the church.
The ice is so thick on that little stretch after a significant snowfall last weekend and sub-zero temperatures all week that it has become something of a spectator sport watching unsuspecting drivers spin their wheels pointlessly before accepting defeat and reversing back down the road.
Very much a creature of habit myself the snowfall, while quite beautiful, has disturbed my routine, a reality it took me a couple of days to come to terms with.
Once I had accepted the foolhardiness of trying to get my car out and the disruption of my regimented selection of walking locations on each particular day I found a new freedom that often accompanies a loss of routine.
When I used to work a lot with people who wanted to give up smoking, before they decided that vaping was better than absolute abstinence, I used to tell them to disturb their routine as much as they could.
“Buy a different brand, get cigarettes from a different shop if you always buy them in the same place, have your first one earlier or later and your last one of the day too, hold it between different fingers or in your other hand.”
When they came back for the next session they had invariably already done my work for me because bringing something destructive that has become routine and unconscious into consciousness makes it so much easier to shift.
When you just keep doing what you did there isn’t room for some of the surprising changes that might emerge.
Change of any sort is often uncomfortable at first but on the other side of that discomfort is generally something better.
My wife and I have walked together most days this week which is not something we generally do and that’s been nice, although I have had to walk more slowly than usual to prevent her from complaining that she needs to break into a run to keep up.
The landscapes I walk through every day of the year look different in the snow and they’ve caused me to notice little details I’d never otherwise see.
One day my daughter came with me and on our way back in a direction we would never have travelled without the snow we went to the baker and bought smiley-faced doughnuts.
“When was the last time we bought these?” she asked me deciding that she’d have the one with the smarties rather than the icing effigy of Santa Claus.
“I don’t know but you were definitely still at school.”
Lovely memories triggered by baked goods.
The dogs sniffed the air picking up the scent of the hot sausage roll taken home for my son.
Even the man across the road who never smiles or says hello gave me a cheery greeting when I was moved inexplicably to bid him good morning.
“Perhaps it’s me that’s been unsociable in the past,” I think to myself, not at all unreasonably.
So, rather than being restricted and frustrated by the snow, I have reached the end of the week feeling buoyed and invigorated something I could not have imagined if you’d told me last week that my precious routine would be upended.
This could be a new dawn although I still didn’t manage to say “No” to a load of extra work that I could have done without so there’s still progress required.
Still, for another day or so at least while I plough through it I can watch the wheels spinning on the corner by the church and wonder why the drivers aren’t learning anything about the benefits of taking a different route once in a while.
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