“Nature doesn’t hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”
Laozi

Routine can be described as the grooves we carve to keep chaos out, and it’s seductive in its promise of waking at the same time, eating the same breakfast, and treading familiar paths. But the question remains: does the rhythm free your thoughts, or does it squeeze them?

Decision fatigue—that slow erosion of willpower by the weight of inconsequential choices—is real. I once asked my wife this: what if we stopped choosing, and instead built a life that reacted? This would be a scaffolding of habits and constraints. I’m sheltering freedom.

I discovered an insightful Buddhist observation a while ago when I first started reading from Visuddhimagga. It’s about the nature of attention, which acts like a waterfall effect. Samma Sati is the Pali term for that, and it serves as a door that leads to Samma Samadhi, or the right concentration—the stability and clarity of mind experienced from inward as absorbed attention.

When I meditate, there’s always this vibrating surface of babbling thoughts, like a subroutine running in the background that collapses regions of mindspace into point-like singularities. I observe them and, whenever I inquire, I’m starting to feel their gravitational pull.

The mind has this wavy quality to it, oscillating even at rest. Then there’s also this switch, like a dam that turns a river into a reservoir, which is difficult to sustain, but undeniably there. It’s a soft control, a gentle steering of the mind’s current; it’s how we speak, write, and think. Long-term meditation sharpens this control, making it more efficient, so that the thoughts become more like balloons floating in the breeze, with the mind acting as a feather brushing gently against them.

Attention, I think, is an act of rebellion now, because to choose where you focus and to resist the undertow of distraction is to reclaim a piece of yourself. Meditation teaches this in small, quiet ways, where each breath is a protest.

Moreover, attention is the aperture through which the world flows. And the world isn’t patient, as it clamors with scrolls, stories, and feeds—all noise disguised as signal. We’ve pretty much traded the depth of chapters for the brevity of reels, resulting in a cacophony that demands our focus but leaves us drained, leading to psychological obliteration; a war of attrition where our minds are the battlefield.

Thus, routine is a framework that holds space for focus. It also demands resolve, for a routine without thought becomes a rut, a life of noise only dressed in order, transforming us into “blameless passengers swept along in others’ fantasies, granted some agency within the confines of a script but unable to shape the narrative”.

Stop.