Welcome back to our many-part series of questions about whether you are ready to become a meandering minimalist. If the answer is no, or not yet, we offered some alternate options. Part 1 asked if you actually like travel. Part 2 encouraged you to think through your obligations. Then, Part 3 talked about your potential travel companions. Part 4 talked about your health and health insurance options, and Part 5 talked about having less stuff, both theoretically and practically. Part 6 encouraged you to begin thinking about how mobile your lifestyle is, especially in terms of fun. And now, Part 7 on routines!
From the outside, our lives may look chaotic. Every thirty to ninety days, we pick up everything we own and move somewhere new. More often than not, it’ll be somewhere we’ve not been before, and we’ll be trying to function a language we don’t know, relying on our own naïve, er, native, wit. Obviously, we like this form of chaos, or we like it enough. But in fact, one of the reasons we suspected meandering would work for us that one of us really likes routines, and the other doesn’t. The one who doesn’t like them obtains a new set of circumstances to play around with. He doesn’t need to stick with decisions he’s made in the past. And the one who loves them gets to come up with new ones every month or three!
Simply put, we get to experiment with our lives all the time, in ways big and small. In fact, we’ve been surprised by how much of what we thought of as personality is context. For instance: in Britain, we drink tea all day long. In Tallahassee, we drank iced tea. We spent a lot more time in the library in Oslo – where there were English-language books – than we did in Istanbul (where we didn’t find any). Now that we live right by the beach, we’ve incorporated a walk or run into our routines every morning. (We suspect part of the reason we do it now is that we know it’s only temporary.)
One thing we’ve learned is to think carefully about what goes into a routine, and what it means. Here’s an example: we used to love taking our bikes out on long rides. It helped that we had a beautiful, paved bike trail nearby. (Whereas riding a bike in Istanbul would have been the equivalent of suicide.) We knew we wanted to have some version of that wherever we were. But it took some effort to think through what ‘that’ was. Fresh air? Exercise? Time together to talk? All three, ideally, but what would replace it?
Some things are non-negotiable. But what are they, and what makes them so? Maybe it’s a cup of coffee first thing, or twenty minutes of quiet before bed, or ignoring your email until noon. For us, it’s some form of exercise, pretty much every day, even though we do a ton of walking.
In order to lessen the stress our life of constant novelty entails, we have a pretty careful set of strategies. We’ve written about settling in fast, routines we’ve developed to take us through the tricky first few days in a new place. We have a standard grocery list for our first-day shop, and a set of procedures we go through in every place we stay. And a lot of the rest of it is malleable, allowing us to discover a new thing we love, or to say goodbye to something that used to be useful, but now isn’t. That is, after all, one of the main values of travel: if you let it, it changes you.
So before embarking on a big trip, it’s worth thinking about your own routines and how flexible you are able to be about them. But that doesn’t mean you can’t go anywhere if you’re a control freak. One of us has found that travel – where you are regularly thrown into situations in which you have no control – is, for that very reason, relaxing, providing a chance to let it all go.
And here’s the thing: you don’t have to uproot your lives to do this kind of thinking. Whatever your life is like, it’s worth considering which routines help you and which don’t. (The latter are also sometimes known as bad habits.) As we’ve said, travel is disruptive. But sometimes disruption is a good thing. Perhaps paradoxically, living with constant change has helped us to see what we want not to change.
