On Routine

I am slightly cautious with being accustomed to routine because it seems to deny some measure of my autonomy. It is a strangely liberating feeling - although to some, unsettling - to wake up to a series of substantive decisions that have yet to be made, which as a matter of probability would never in its fulfilment recreate a day adequately similar to the previous day, or to the same day of the previous week. Conversely, routines are, in effect, restrictions on the choices you might make over the course of time. 

This is of course a rather narrow conception of routine, and much turns upon how scrupulous its provisions are. Further, even the most spontaneous or disorganised people live within minimal habitual boundaries, the most patent of which would be eating and sleeping. One simply has to do so, preferably in a routinely manner, to stay alive.

The difference, I suppose, is that these habitual restrictions on the course of one's life in a day are fundamentally involuntary. By contrast, a daily routine to most of us probably means a sequence of actions or procedures regularly followed that we constructed on our own, for our purposes. Another way of putting it is that rather than merely taking momentary decision-making out of your own hands, a routine is simply making those decisions in advance. Now this surely is no restriction on autonomy, is it? In fact it is a more sophisticated manner of exercising it. 

Barring any deterministic objection (which this note is not meant to address), I think the real question is perhaps why we value the concept of autonomy, especially in relation to its practical out-workings. Much can be said, but for now, the most penetrating analysis must come from James, who wrote,

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin. (James 4:13-17 ESV)

In gist, I think the short answer is that autonomy is not designed for the preservation and attainment of personal agenda, attractive as that may sound. It is nevertheless a legitimate volitional principle but what it expresses is one's capacity for true obedience to divine agenda. Consequently, I suppose, biblical autonomy enshrines above all the need for a constant, regular, if not, at least routine, searching for what the Lord wills.