Our lives are made up of a conglomeration of consciously made and unconsciously derived routines. We awake of a morning with the rushed realisation of the dawn of a new day, a day which whilst may be very different than any other day we will experience in our lives – is in fact a day which is very much the same as every other. We snooze our alarm clocks precisely five times before we look at the alarming hour glaring at us in its fluorescent red glow and hurriedly propel ourselves out of bed. We rush to switch on the coffee perculator and habitually reach for the dog food. We find the toothbrush in the position it has always been, we brush our hair starting with the left side and working our way around to the right and I daresay we survey our reflection in the mirror in much the same way as we have 100 times before.

Much of the more mundane tasks of life are approached by a sense of order – a routine which overrides any conscious decisions or thoughts on the outworking of these tasks. Feeding the dog, straightening the bed covers, sorting the mail, taking our vitamins, breakfast on the run, retrieving our keys from the key rack and locking the door, driving the route to work and traveling the same roads that we have for the past 5 years… these are all actions we rarely think about – we just act. They are the substance of many years of mental conditioning and so they will remain if we should choose it.

Boredom is the substance of mundane, routine, rut-induced living. We tire of the same processes, we suffer under the strain of expectation and monotonous predictions and we are stifled beneath the stress of Groundhog Day. Diversity even in its most delicate form can give us a new lease of life for it inspires us to think outside the square, to ponder those unconscious decision making processes and determine to do things differently. Whether this means shaving the left leg before the right, taking a new route to work or determining to drive down that street that we have often wondered where it leads, getting up earlier, having breakfast on the porch instead of whilst running out the door, choosing our wardrobe the night before work, listening to the radio in the car rather than a cd or vice versa or perhaps traveling a day without music entirely. All of these things may seem so inconsequential in the whole scheme of life yet it is these ‘small’ aspects of our lives that can cause grinch to set in. We become dissatisfied with doing rather than thinking – we become bored with mundane and stifled by routine. We long for adventure, excitement, change and challenge yet every day without fail we box ourselves in to lowly expectations and mind-numbing activities, what more can we expect?

I think that sometimes, though it will shake the foundations of stability and alter our perceptions of life – we need to do things differently, to challenge ourselves to change, adapt and redefine the way we do life. After many monotonous days, months and years of doing the same thing we’ve always done in the way that we’ve always done it – we actually may find that change can bring a refreshing to our lives that cannot be achieved by any other means. We begin to think, not just act – we begin to change and grow, not just remain static and complacent with life.