Words by Madison Grace (She/They)

Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about.
~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

I sit at my computer. Warm sun leaks through the window, washing the room with 5pm. I Google ‘meaning of routine oxford english dictionary’ and my screen comes aglow with words and phrases like regimen and normal and standard procedure. In the absence of any fixed external routine, I have been thinking a lot about the words that we use to quantify our time, and ‘routine’ just doesn’t do it for me.

Routine reeks of the clinical; the 9-5; a way of thinking about time that collapses its fluidity. It feels like a word prescribed onto us, calling us toward a duty to be productive — to separate our day into the things we must do and the things we want to do. There are dichotomies implied: Work//pleasure. Duty//desire. Right now, with our external routines having given way to slower days spent mostly indoors, the language we use can transform the way we think about days and our time.

The word I’ve been using lately is practice. Its definitions aren’t sexier per-say (see: habit, custom, repeated exercise), but they err away from the agenda, the drive toward progression that routine implies. The word itself feels spacious, gentle. In this sense, perhaps we can say that a practice is simply a container. A period of time we parse out of our day to devote to something worth practicing, whether it be making breakfast or stretching & moving to music (thank you Betty Grumble), or watering your garden, or weeding, or sharing a meal with your housemate or partner after a day spent in separate worlds beneath the same roof or, maybe, it’s just sitting.

A practice is yours to define because it abides by none of the progress-driven values that operate out there, in the grind of the world of work and labour and capitalism. And the more we practice, the deeper we go — with each repetition we plumb new depths, notice the moments the mind wanders or your body feels truly inhabited.

These small pleasures become the framework of a day, light-leaking into the rest of it. Rather than a binary, work and pleasure can seep into one another — these practices becoming a way of facilitating work, your duties, all the things we still have to do.