Sleeper’s Bell // Bored

Post by Misha //

I recently came across the daily routine of Ursula K. Le Guin ––

5:30 a.m. – wake up and lie there and think.
6:15 a.m. – get up and eat breakfast (lots).
7.15 a.m. – get to work writing, writing, writing.
Noon – lunch.
1:00-3:00 p.m. – reading, music.
3:00-5:00 p.m. correspondence, maybe house cleaning.
5:00-8:00 p.m. make dinner and eat it.
After 8:00 p.m. – I tend to be very stupid and we won’t talk about this.

It’s a good schedule. And in Le Guin’s lifetime, she wrote 23 novels and hundreds of stories, essays, and poems, so it must have worked for her.

I tend to put a lot of faith in routine, to the point of ritual. This has always been a thing with me but it’s intensified in my 30s. Wake up, espresso, read a little, write something, shower, stretching and music until my hair is dry, apple cut into quarters, then eighths, then sixteenths. Go to work. Take a little walk. Etc.

When you do something enough times in the same way it becomes very easy to locate change in the body, in the air, in the sound of the birds. You can start to believe that this is the key to making sure that nothing goes horribly wrong. Probably there’s something more or less correct in this belief. It’s not useless to carve a little stability out of shifting sands. It’s also a clever bit of magical thinking.

There’s no time slot for watching the news and feeling scared in Le Guin’s schedule. Nor doomscrolling, nor watching an episode of television the exact number of times it takes to make you forget your own name. Maybe that’s all part of what happens after 8pm. Personally, I have been lately needing to set some time aside to let the fear in. I’m trying to do it in manageable chunks, not let it get out of hand.

Last night, I sat in the dark and listened to this song three times back to back. When my habits fail me I can always rely on pedal steel and softly picked guitar to pick up some of the slack.

There’s no series of rituals you can perform, no order you can stick to, no regimen you can follow, that will keep everything on the rails nearly as much as you might like it to. Today I’m grateful for the songs which nudge me back into orbit when I start to float off.

Buy Sleeper’s Bell’s wonderful new album, Clover, here.