I aspire to live in a pattern. Some may call it a routine. Today, on Sunday September 18 2022, I wish to thrive in a lifestyle routine. I exclaim this with temporal specificity because I'm sure I'll change my mind about it at some point. But for now, while my life feels crazy, wackadoodle, and entirely routineless and patternless, I crave lifestyle patterns.
But is my life entirely patternless? On a grand scale, perhaps viewing this in a weekly or monthly view, perhaps not. Aside from weekly recurring class times and the expectation to be at school, everything else in between makes life feel chaotic. There are, in fact, plenty of patterns in my life. They just exist at smaller scales.
For instance,
every day the sun rises, and every day the sun sets. Like the sun, I also rise and set. I like this pattern.
Every morning I pick out an outfit to wear. The act of choosing an outfit is part of my routine, but the clothes I wear are certainly not. The outfit is informed by my mood, the weather, the activities I plan on doing that day, and what's clean! For a while I aimed to simplify this pattern by wearing jumpsuits or overalls that took 90% of the problem solving process out of the equation. Similarly, while I was living out of a suitcase over the summer, my choices were so limited that my outfit was usually one of 3 options, which made the process incredibly simple.
If I am coming to school, I usually walk to the subway. There are 2 paths that I can take, and I usually defer to the shorter route in the morning. This is a part of my commute that is entirely within my control. The next part is entirely outside of my control: the A train. As part of a public transportation system, there are an infinite number of reasons for the train to travel not as expected. Sometimes the issues can be quickly resolved. Other times they can completely eradicate train service. Who knows what will happen today!
The next part of my daily life pattern is a big question mark: all the things I have planned for the day. Let's skip to the end of the day.
If I am taking the subway home in the evening, I will usually walk home from the Nostrand Ave. train station, taking the shorter route. When I get home, I turn off all unnecessary lights and perform my nighttime wash routine. This routine is hardly a routine. I certainly do not practice it in full every day, though I aspire to.
Then I will make my way to bed, and turn out the lights. The next part is also entirely out of my control: my dreams. Sometimes I have really bad nightmares, and other times, nothing at all. It's like going to the movies in your mind, except they are all very weird and sometimes very bad or confusing.
The process of writing out my daily routine helped to call out all the inconsistencies in this pattern. Thinking about scale is really important, because although everything cohesively feels chaotic, there are both large and small patterns that are observed in life. These include the seasons, sunrise and sunset, hygienic routines, and movements that we perform repeatedly on a regular basis.
How might I recreate this in code? To abstract it a bit, it would look like an overall structure with different layers of patterns in varying scales, and a lot of noise in between, also at different scales.