144. ...structure and flex.
(morning thinking)
I’ve been thinking about structure and flex. Again? Yeah, again.
I like this groove of thinking and I can spend a lot of time in it. I like the phrase “structure and flex”. I think it describes a healthy philosophy to living. Most of my adult life to this point happened without any kind of purposeful structure. Building routines, swapping negative habits for positive ones, crafting purposeful daily life practices gave me peace and freedom in a way I hadn’t previously experienced and so couldn’t have expected. I think about it as my positive rule governed behaviour; the programming I’ve put in place in order to live life with a little more clarity and a little less uncertainty.
Hmm. What’s important to me - More clarity or less uncertainty? Am I putting on my lovely green cable knit cardigan this morning to be less cold or more warm? More of something I like or less of something I don’t like? Does it matter?
When I first make a new rule for myself the language that I write with makes longs strings of this then thats. Strict orders and imperatives that are long, precise and unforgiving. I make firm rules, draw hard lines in the sand and I CAN NOT CROSS THEM. As time goes by I refine and reduce the complexity of the code.
For example, my initial morning routine looked like this...
Get up at 5am.
Open and close all doors gentle like a ninja.
Go to bathroom (y’know)
Go to kitchen
On kitchen counter between the sink and hob, from left to right and equally spaced place…
Coffee mug.
Inverted Aeropress.
Flask.
Flask lid.
Put two scoops of coffee in the Aeropress.
Fill kettle to maximum and boil*.
While kettle boils perform…
30 squats.
30 twists.
20 press-ups.
Fill the rest of the kettle Boil Time with stretches (stroke cat while stretching).
When kettle boils…
Pour two fingers of boiling water into mug (warming).
Fill Aeropress.
Pour remaining water into flask.
Put kettle back on it’s base.
Screw lid onto flask.
Screw filter onto Aeropress.
Stretch.
After stretching for 2 minutes (more cat time) invert Aeropress and plunge.
Take coffee to writing desk and journal.
Meditate.
Read.
Run.
This algorithm worked very well for establishing a rock solid morning routine and I stuck to it, with little variations to the exercise routine and not much more digression from the script, for a couple of years. If it was tipping down with rain or super icy I might not run but I’d do a callisthenics workout instead.
I find it very unsettling to make my first coffee out with the bounds of this very rigid practice. Sometimes I’ll force myself to break the routine and it is decidedly uncomfortable.
The routine was an easy continuity salve to implement during the early chaos and uncertainty of Covid Lockdown. Make my own normal. There were fewer than usual external variables, fewer flies to gum up my freshly distilled normality ointment. The consistency of a morning routine kept me grounded. As restrictions lifted things changed. Little moments of chaos were slowly introduced.
As Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder said in his 1871 essay on military strategy, “No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces.”
- I think doing accents is dodgy ground now but it’s acceptable good natured badinage when it’s between two former military colonialists nations. I think that you’d do yourself a disservice if you read that quote without a firm German accent. It’s wonderful. Do it out loud just now. Pause and do it. Take a little moment of chaos. DO IT.
As the constraints Covid Lockdown lifted, little moments of social chaos were slowly introduced in the form of Other People and their demands on my space and my time. Life wheadled it’s way in and monkey wrenched my heretofore smoothly running works. They weren’t unwelcome interjections exactly but the disturbance to my routines was unsettling.
Our spare room backs onto the kitchen and when family, emboldened by the lifting of restrictions, came to stay I’d be uncomfortable about waking them at 5am with a rousing kettle boil Reveille. I’d break the routine. Pause it entirely and lie quietly in bed when my eyes opened at 5am or get up sneaky, gentle, quiet and just skip straight to reading and writing time. The disruption was uncomfortable, visceral and unwelcome, but I could see those days of exception as proof that the rules worked.
More of the external world woke up, society got busy again as the old reality reasserted itself. Chaos poked into my neatly ordered life.
We began to travel a little, to visit family and friends, some work started to creep back in. I tried to keep rigidly to the routine but when we travelled, or I had to leave early for work, it would fall into disarray.
I would get anxious when the routine wasn’t neat. I felt like a floundering toddler, armbandless for the first time, setting out ungainly on their inaugural width of a swimming pool. With familiar orange floats around my arms I could glide, dignified and swanlike across the water. Without them things got messy. I could see that the swim was possible but I’d like my armbands back please.
Over the last year or so I’ve been leaning into the idea of structure with flexibility. Structure and flex. I feel like I’ve dug deep foundations and buttressed up my structure, but the flex needs some work.
I think maybe the key is in recognising that the structure and the flex can’t be separate. I think the entire edifice needs to be integrated. The flexibility grows up through well laid, solid foundations rather than sitting on top. It’s all one thing.
Solid base code habits will let me freestyle a little over the top.
More recently I’ve been experimenting with cleaner, simpler less complicated foundational programming.
The algorithm for my morning now looks more like this.
Get up early.
Make coffee
Stretch and exercise.
Write.
Read.
The complex early code helped me establish healthy habits that allowed me to grow and build strength. I proved to myself that I could. In that exercise I found a peace that lasted long into my day. When the process was interrupted I would get anxious so I worked to make peace with the intrusions. I hoped to learn to welcome them. I think if the system is too rigid external factors will always exert more pressure than the structure can cope with.
Cracks appear in a rigid structure when it’s hit by high winds or shaken by seismic tremors. The thick grey trunk of a big solid oak splits and cracks under the force of a hurricane but the same storm can’t snap a bendy green sapling.
When we first write our rules we’re testing the water to see what works. I will do X every day come what may! As we build up experience we’re able to delete unnecessary rows and strip it back, get the same results with more elegant code. It becomes ok to do things a little off book. Get a little creative.
My life likes simplicity of structure, a strong base, firm foundations and flexibility up top where the chaos of the rest of the world marauds about.
Strong, stable roots and wavy fronds.
I have a safe base. I can be more gentle with myself now that I’ve dug in a little. I might even get super cool with being all loosey goosey. Doubt that. Nope.
*The idea of a full kettle boil for a single coffee might have set some of you on an eco rage. I can explain! I boil a full kettle and save the hot water I don’t need in a flask for later. It’s used in Gus’s porridge and coffee for Kathleen and I when she gets up and then a couple of herbal teas for me. My thoery is that a single long boil is more energy efficient than multiple short - just enough - boils. I tested this with a plug-in power meter on the kettle socket and the theory seems to bear out.
I feel like I might have written about some of this stuff before. I suppose the danger of just running my mind and typey fingers without a plan is that things I think about often will get written about more often. Maybe I should try and find an angle, write about a specific topic or within a niche, plan future posts. Maybe I should devise an editorial schedule. That seems like an awful lot of work. I’ll probably just keep waffling.
Thank you for reading. It continues to delight and astonish me that you do.
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Love you bye.
Paul.
And the flask idea… did this come from an exceptionally thoughtful friend of yours 😂
I love the flex & structure. I am way more flex these days but there’s definitely a structure there too! I love how we can become more confident in being able to drop things but know we’ll pick them right back up again when the time is right. In the old days I used to think if I let it go even once it was over… I’m older & maybe wiser!