An Invertebrate Creature of Jelly-like Constituency

Every time I’m on break, I have to deal with the unsettling dynamic of moving from a structured, fairly routine life to a much more amorphous existence. It’s vertebrate to invertebrate: un-vertebration.

So, this is me right now:

When I’m busy, I long for free time, to escape from the shackles of schedule. And a day off is wonderful. But when summer hits and I have whole weeks of freedom, it isn’t actually that great. I think work and rest compliment each other, and we get out of sorts when we only have one and not the other.

I’ve been thinking: It’s kind of existentially straining to not have any routines. There’s comfort and strength to be found in repetition. Think of the fundamental rhythms that under-gird our lives: day and night, the three meals, the holidays, the weeks, months and years. People associate jazz with spontaneity and improvisation, but really that improvisation takes place within a highly structured skeleton of tempo, key, form, and style.

I would argue that likewise humans in general work best when we have a foundational skeleton of routine and tradition to “improvise” on top of. There’s only so much choice we can handle psychologically; if we have too many decisions to make, we get overwhelmed and have trouble making any of them. And socially too, some things need to be set, if only for coordination. We drive on the right side of the road. Why? Because we all have to drive on the same side! So it’s too simplistic to say that the more freedom a person has, the better, and that anything that reduces the amount of choice in a person’s life is to be labeled as constraining (and thus to be fought). That being ‘tied down’ means unhappiness. I’d say it’s just as likely that not having a place to tie down would lead to unhappiness.