Sunday after Saturday. We live by the predictable. Monday – back to work, Thursday afternoon – radio show, 7pm – watch the news. These patterns are useful in at least two ways: they generate a sense of stability, and they offer a safe frisson when they are broken now and again. How can you have the thrill of breaking with routine, after all, if you don’t have a routine?
There are some routines that are better than others, and those I have just described are positive because they reflect choice. If they are broken, by and large it is because I want to break them. I have control of my life. And that is, paradoxically, both true and illusory at the same time. In our efforts as a species to bring our world under control, to ensure predictability or worse, eradicate uncertainty, we mess with forces that can be menacing in the extreme. Nature is not essentially predictable, at least not in the fine day to day detail. If we never want to be uncomfortably hot or cold, if we always want too be in charge, we must defy the way the world wants to work and we ignore the fact that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Hopefully, our lives do not need to be ‘nasty, brutish and short’ as Hobbes suggested, but if we think we can have all we want, immediately, without cost, we are sadly and dangerously deluded.
