Routine as dedication and devotion | #6

My desire for stimulation has flatlined into playing the long term game

Hi friends,

 I had such overwhelming support about my Vipassana experience that I wrote about in the last issue — grateful for you all!

Sharing a couple of portraits I painted recently:

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As I get ready to put my routine on hold for a couple of weeks to celebrate my dad’s 60th in Australia, I wanted to share how important routine has become for me. Most of my life I have moved from country to country. Many of you know this but for those who don’t, I was born in Malaysia, grew up in Australia, studied abroad in France, spent a year in China and have been in the United Kingdom for most of my twenties. With moving around being my status quo, I never understood why having a routine or normalcy was considered important for a person’s wellbeing. 

Even in my many years in London, I’d always sought out cheap flights to Europe or ways to be a tourist in this city, aiming for each week to be as different as possible from the one before. I used to think that people with routines were kinda boring. But for the last year or so, I have not only embraced routine but found that having a routine is what allows me to thrive.

I started to value routine when I left my corporate job, which had a predefined structure, and shifted into remote and async freelance work, which had almost zero predefined structure. In that change, I quickly realised total freedom of how I spend my time can lead to chaos and a feeling of being ungrounded. While I firmly believe that the corporate world has served its purpose in my life and is no longer for me, I’d taken for granted how crucial the structure was for my well being and sense of purpose.

With a traditional job, especially in a physical office, how time is spent is extrinsically imposed. Most of the week’s structure is taken care of -- waking up at a certain hour to reach the office at a certain time then at the end of the day, unwinding by switching off the computer, packing up and going home. On the flip side, when work can be done anywhere and at any time, the greater flexibility invites exploration of ideas out of the norm. I could work from a different cafe each day or I could work in my pj’s or I could sleep until the first meeting. Or all the above! The way time is spent becomes intrinsically imposed. 

While the change in my job’s predefined structure initiated this shift in perspective, it was the realisation of where I wanted to focus my time and effort that solidified the urgency and importance of routine. Wednesday afternoon spent painting life models became a fixture and Friday’s off to train in massage therapy was no big issue. The freedom to do-as-I-please with my time as long as my current paid work yielded results meant I got to live closer to my truth. And because I was leaning into things I felt called towards rather than things I had been told I ought to do, dedication and devotion came easily. Suddenly it became a matter of prioritising them over other things. It was like refocusing the lens of a camera to see clearly. With the clarity, it was obvious that everything else was now more or less a distraction.

Reaching for the paint brush for the first time in my late twenties, people often ask me how these realisations came to be. Something you should know about me is that I spent most of my twenties suppressing my identity as a multi hyphenated creative. And instead forced myself to go to business school and spend five years in corporate. As such, when I started writing as self-care with the psycho-emotional support of my writer’s collective, a lot of that suppression was unearthed. Much of my writing over the past year was about coming to terms with my identity; realising I have creative flairs and dormant artistry that wanted to be expressed. The more I wrote, the more I could parse out true desire from mimetic desires and the more courage I had to explore the things that felt true to who I am.

What started as a desire to collect another accolade training as a yoga teacher, led me to rekindle with dance. Dance is something I enjoyed in my teens, and in recent years appreciate how it allows me to come back into my body. Eventually these explorations landed me on what felt like another calling, which is to work one-to-one through healing touch in massage and bodywork. 

Similarly with oil painting, what started as a yearning to pick up charcoal again to draw life models, led me to be curious about oil painting and mixing colours. Eventually I signed up for a summer course in oil painting and found the studio where I now paint regularly and have never looked back.

I have never felt as true to my core as I do now. I wake up every morning and want to spend as much time as I can on these two. There is a bodily understanding that regardless of what happens I will keep painting and keep on finding opportunities to deepen my bodywork. It doesn’t matter if other people praise me or look puzzled at me; it doesn’t matter if I gain fame or notoriety from it; nothing matters aside from my ability to keep engaging and deepening my practices. It feels so true; so real; so core that motivation isn’t even a question. Every time I come back to London with jetlag, I still wake up and go paint with no questions asked. I don’t have to negotiate with myself, I don’t have to create accountability, I just go, enjoy the process and let the outcome be whatever it is. 

As a result of wanting to make space for these two practices, I have become very firm in my routine. I guess the notion of routine is like why Steve Jobs famously had one outfit so he didn’t have to ‘waste time’ thinking about what to wear. He can save that energy and spend it elsewhere. Routine to me means building the writer collective, my day job, from the same home office setup, buying groceries online weekly, cooking my own food, cycling to the art studio on set days a week and carving out dedicated time for my work, my art and my bodywork practice. 

It means not worrying too much about what I wear, though I don’t think I want to reach Steve Jobs levels. It also means the food I cook comes from a rotating list of recipes I’ve refined over time. I hit the gym twice a week to do the same routine I’ve done for the past two years. It just means that I am no longer seeking new and shiny things to keep me distracted and stimulated. My sti

mulation has flatlined into playing the long term game. I set my life up this way so I can keep honing the same two craft of bodywork and painting over my entire lifetime. My dedication and devotion is here to stay and I am willing to become more boring for it.