Ralph: That about sums it up for me.

Like me, Ralph is not in a time warp, but he seems stuck in routines.

There are many moments in popular culture that suggest routines. Here is a pop song from the 40's:

If I love again, though it's someone new.

If I love again, it will still be you.

I thought of this song when I read about Paul McCartney's divorce from his second wife. The story suggests that the main reason he married her was that she reminded him of his first wife.

The idea of routines also occurs in literature. One example is the last line from Dylan Thomas's poem about the death of a child in the WWII bombing of London (1957):

After the first death, there is no other.

This line may allude to the idea that since we usually are unable to complete the mourning of the first death that is important to us, we are compelled to repeat it with each subsequent one.

I often feel like Ralph in Groundhog Day. There have been, and still are, many routines in my life that seem to be repetitive and virtually unchanging. Much of my eating, sleeping, working, quarreling, and indeed, thinking, feeling and even my mediation, are mostly routine.

Escape from Routine

Not that all routines are bad. We need routines, lest we drown in details. But the question arises, who is master, me or routine? Probably the latter, because when I escape routine, it is almost always an accident. Here are two examples of accidental escape, the first from my own life.

My wife Suzanne and I made a trip to Atlanta in August 2003. Since I routinely fly, I assumed that we would do that. However, Suzanne had never been in the South, so we compromised by flying there but returning in a rental car. We stayed two days in Atlanta, then drove back in 6 days. The South that we drove thru was hot as Hades, but we had an unbelievably good time, because we talked to our heart's content.

Until this event, we both thought that we talked frequently, often at length, and on occasion, in depth. Of course, we are one or both of us often out of the house. Still we thought that at least at home, we were communicating.

In Atlanta, no change because we were both busy. The change occurred during the drive back to California, when we were together all the time for six days.

I spent most of the first day complaining. Why were we doing this? Why had I allowed myself to be roped in, etc? Late in the day, however, I said "At least I am out of my usual routine." We both laughed.

Since Suzanne is a grief counselor at the local Hospice, she talks a lot about death. So I thought of a new question: how would you feel if I were to die? At first she spoke about what she would do, her actions. When I repeated the question, she talked at length about her feelings. She asked me the same question about my feelings in the case of her death. Then we laughed when we spoke about asking our children a similar question. (As it turned out, the question didn't work with them). But it worked with us. We were off to the races.

That was the beginning of a five-day torrent of conversation, as if the floodgates had burst. We talked, laughed, and cried our way virtually non-stop thru Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and southern California. It was like paradise.

After this experience, we realized that we have so many routines in our life that we rarely talk about anything but business. There is work outside and at home, food preparation, repairs, garden, cleaning, etc. There are also many other routines. We had the practice, for example of watching TV or DVDs together from 8 pm to our usual bedtime at 10. The two hours are not devoid of talk, but only pedestrian talk. We complain about the waste of time, but often one or both are so tired that TV is all we can manage.

Once home, we vowed never again to lapse back. We agreed that if necessary, we would just drive in circles around Santa Barbara for at least one weekend a month. Nevertheless, there were too many pulls. We lapsed back into our talk routine; it continues today. We tried taking long trips on trains and cars, but it wasn't the same.

Emmy Rainwater led me to a parallel story from her life (Rainwater 2000). A single mother, she describes an accidental breaking of routines with her teenage son. When her best friend died unexpectedly, she vowed a three-day period of silence. She told her son that he could talk to her, but during the three days she wouldn't reply.

To her surprise, the son, usually laconic, talked her head off. He told her his thoughts, feelings, hopes and dreams, indeed, the very kinds of things that she had always wanted to know. However, because he always replied by arguing or with silence, she had given up. One can surmise that before the three-day silence, they were deeply enmeshed in routines in which the mom did most of the talking, or was directive, distracted or critical.

Intentional Breaks from Routine

To find breaks from routine that were not completely accidental, I had to search my memory. One occurred that changed my routine fear response during the period when I protested the Vietnam War. Not feeling fear made me reckless. Being also the chair of my university department at the time, my protest activities attracted the attention of the media. For that reason I drew considerable criticism, both on campus and from the public.

I was awakened by a phone call early in the morning of a speech I was to make to a very large meeting protesting the Cambodian incursion. The caller refused to identify himself, threatening to kill me and my family for "stirring the students up." I tried to reason with him, but he was suspicious and hung up after some fifteen minutes of relentless threats.

Rather than being upset, I felt blank. I knew I would be unable to speak effectively unless I snapped out of it. Having just joined a self-help psychotherapy group, I used one of their devices. I guessed that it might be fear causing my blankness, so I said to myself "I am afraid," a sentence that I hadn't used since childhood. Nothing happened at first, so I kept repeating that line.

After many repetitions, my body went into what might be described as a seizure of fear. Falling to the floor, I involuntarily shook and sweated in what felt like a tsunami of emotion. It was quite enjoyable, like a roller coaster ride, even though there were no accompanying thoughts. It stopped after some fifteen minutes of tremor and sweat bath. I was no longer blank. In fact, I gave a poetic speech without notes. This incident involved a break out of my routine suppression of fear, the kind of suppression that most men do for all their lives (This and other examples of catharsis are described in Scheff 1979).

A second incident that was not quite accidental occurred a week after, suggesting a way to deal with anger without shouting, my usual routine. On a flight from the local airport, I chanced to be sitting next to a colleague from another department in my university. I had always been intimidated by this man because he was senior to me and had a sharp tongue. However, I was still in a good mood from the incident above, so I tried to tell him about it. He didn't allow me to, interrupting me with an "objective" analysis. In the language my students use, he was "psychoanalyzing" me. But I in turn didn't let him finish.