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RoutinesDecember 28, 2006 When I finished evening chores tonight at the last barn (Barn #3 in the previous installment of the saga), my nine days of overlapping horse-sits officially came to an end. In a word: whew! It's been a long nine days -- nine long days of all-too-short days, if you get my drift. Nine days of working in other people's barns, looking after other people's horses, living in other people's houses, driving other people's trucks . . . Following other people's routines. My own routines have been improvised over time; my spaces arrange themselves to accommodate my routines. Other people's spaces may be congenial, but they don't fit nearly so well. If you and I both wore size 10 shoes and today we bought the same style paddock boot in the same size, then we wore them every day for a month -- by the end of that month if I pulled on your boots by accident I would know immediately that they weren't mine. They would have molded to fit your foot; they would not fit mine nearly so well, though it's quite possible I could wear them all day without raising a blister. Ditto other people's routines. The routine at Barn #1 fits me like a custom-made boot; however, I still can't figure out the coffeemaker in the guesthouse so I bring my own, and I cuss whoever designed the lighting because it's all dim, indirect, and atmospheric -- not what's needed by writers and editors. The routine at Barn #2 fits me well too; not surprisingly, because my horse has lived there for more than three years and I've helped devise it. But for the last week or so I've been doing not only my usual job but that of the owner. The owner lives next door to the barn; I don't. The drive time was a killer. At Barn #3 the pitchfork was missing a tine so manure kept falling through. The push-broom was ill-suited to sweeping the tack and grain room. Feeding one of the horses required opening and closing two gates or climbing through two fences. It was like dancing all night in shoes two sizes too small. Particularly during those three and a half days that I was looking after three barns at once, I was almost constantly on the go. Finish the morning round and it was nearly time to start the midday; finish the midday and it was almost time to start closing. If I wasn't on the go, I was poised on the balls of my feet, ready to move. My routine involves plenty of mulling time. In the last nine days I've had precious little time to mull, think, woolgather, or write. I haven't ridden Allie or played the guitar in a week. The effect is something like sleep deprivation: as the days went by, I got more irritable, more annoyed, more impatient. All work and no play makes Jill a surly girl -- even when she basically likes the work. I'm chronically mistrustful of people who are on the go all the time. I think they're avoiding something. I think they're in denial. I think they don't dare think about life, the universe, or their own particular lives, because if they did some monster would rise from the black lagoon and bite them on the nose. My week of go-go-going hasn't allayed my suspicions. See, this is what bugs me about corporations, religions, and ideologies: they expect most of us to fit into routines not of our devising. The guys who devised and refined the assembly line did not spend their entire work lives performing the same operation over and over. Do the guys who devised automated voicemail customer service and tech support systems ever have to use them to get a question answered? Doubt it: I bet they all have hotlines direct to people who know what they're doing -- people who ponder and mull and have flashes of intuition. Who aren't generally people who can stand in the same place and turn the same screw a few hundred times a day. Are there people born to stand in the same place and turn the same screw a few hundred times a day? I doubt that too. They're warped that way by prolonged immersion in other people's routines, other people's visions.
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