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

Routine: the grooves we carve to keep chaos out. It’s seductive in its promise; wake at the same time, eat the same breakfast, tread familiar paths. But does the rhythm free your thoughts, or does it squeeze them?

I once asked my wife this: what if we stopped choosing? What if we built a life that reacted instead? A scaffolding of habits and constraints. It wasn’t about caging freedom; it was about sheltering it. Decision fatigue. That slow erosion of willpower by the weight of inconsequential choices is real. Structure isn’t the enemy here. It’s a filter.

I discovered an insightful Buddhist observation a while ago when I first started reading from Visuddhimagga. It’s about the nature of attention, a waterfall effect, the crest of our behavior. Samma Sati is the Pali term for it. It’s 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, collapsing regions of mindspace into point-like singularities. I observe them. Inquire. Feel their gravitational pull, like a character immersed in a warp jump. The mind has this wavy quality to it, oscillating at rest. There also this switch, like a dam that turns a river into a reservoir. Difficult to sustain, but there. It’s a soft control, a gentle steering of the mind’s current. It’s how we speak and write, how we think. Long-term meditation sharpens this control. Makes it more efficient. The thoughts become more like balloons floating in the breeze, with the mind acting as a feather brushing gently against them.

But attention is finite. It’s the bottleneck, the aperture through which the world flows. And the world isn’t patient. It clamors. Scrolls. Stories. Feeds. Noise disguised as signal. We’ve traded the depth of chapters for the brevity of reels. A cacophony demanding our focus but leaving us drained. Psychological obliteration. A war of attrition. The battlefield, our minds.

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

Routine, then, isn’t the enemy. It’s a tool. A framework that holds space for focus. But like all tools, it demands resolve. A routine without thought becomes a rut. A life of noise, only dressed in order. Transformed in blameless passengers, swept along in other’s fantasies, granted some agency within the confines of a script, but unable to shape the narrative.

Stop.