Nothing better to do
I’ve been thinking about the monks in the desert again. I wrote about this article, about work and life at a Benedictine monastery, in an early issue of this newsletter. I have revisited the piece several times since then, each time looking for something slightly different. This time, I went back to it thinking about routine.
The monks’ routine is both suffocating and sacred. It starts at 3:30 a.m., which, ugh. Nothing is sped up or rushed through, from sung-through prayers to the no-more-no-less three hours of daily work. They do basically the same thing, or at least the same category of thing, at the same time every day. The idea of getting through whatever they are doing to move on to the next thing is both antithetical to their philosophy and would also be completely pointless on a practical level. “The monks could pray faster, but they don’t want to,” writes our visitor, who finds himself irritated by the pauses between prayer verses. “They don’t have something better to do.”
This is not an easy or natural mindset for the monks to practice; the abbott refers to a life of prioritizing prayer as “spiritual combat.” But I’m now recognizing that feeling of deeply, truly, not having something better to do. Cleaning the bathroom? Yes please. Cooking lunch? I love it. Taking out the trash? It’s one of three times each day I consistently step outside of my apartment (the other two are dog walks), and I savor it. I’m working a lot too, and struggling to find routine within that. (What’s fun about being a journalist is that your job is always changing, and that’s also what’s hard about it—especially if, like me, your favorite part is the writing, which demands the kind of consistency the rest of the job undermines at every turn.) The larger routine of my day, however, has never been more rigid, or more freeing. This is the point of routine, of course—you don’t have to think about what to do next, or make any decisions about it. You just do it.
There’s a way that giving over to routine can be deadening or self-destructive, of course. “Nothing better to do” can be the siren song of depression. The monks have 1,500 years of tradition guiding them. We’ve been doing this for two months, and not because we want to. Still, I think there’s something useful in contemplating lives in which routine is meaning and meaning is routine. The monks’ routine isn’t sacred despite it being suffocating. Or suffocating, but also somehow sacred. One side wouldn’t exist without the other. The beauty and the difficulty are intertwined, or maybe they are the same thing. I can’t say I fully understand it, but I’m getting closer.