A new routine

Jul 20, 2010 by Daniel Ross-Jones

There comes a point, usually within the first two months, after I’ve moved to a new apartment or city when I do something that feels so completely ordinary I realize it and feel a sense of the extraordinary.  I remember most of them:

• After I left home for college, while living in my first dorm room, I was doing laundry.  I had a feeling of, “This is my life,” not in a negative or degrading way — but in a sense that I was on my own, doing something that I had done previously (but not frequently), responsible to no one but myself for accomplishing whatever I tasked myself to do.
• When I moved out of the college dorms into a house I was sharing with four other friends, I was driving from the house to the grocery store.  I had gone to that particular grocery store numerous times before, but for some reason that time stuck out.  I was listening to the rock station on the radio, it was a fairly relaxing Saturday afternoon right after the school year had started.
• When I moved into my apartment in Milwaukee, it was driving from my office back home again along National Ave.  As I passed Miller Park, something clicked and I suddenly felt like that was home.
• When I moved into my present apartment in Chicago from my previous one, it was coming home from last summer’s job, turning on the air conditioner, and walking into the kitchen for a glass of water.

Add another one to the list: today, as I was on my way into work this morning and turned off Dorchester and into St Johns/Remuera Road, something clicked and felt like all was right in the world.  After the fact I realized I didn’t take a double-look over my shoulder to make sure no one was coming as I turned across what would be the forward lane in the U.S., I didn’t have to think about keeping left, I wasn’t worrying about traffic or what was going on with my day or anything else like that.  It felt like I was simply commuting, and that the experience was just as common and ordinary as I would consider it to be otherwise.

In short, it was a recognition that I had created a new routine.  Things in Auckland are now “familiarly foreign,” as I’ve been saying recently.  There’s still something about things — and I imagine there will remain, as my time here is so limited — that looks off.  The way the traffic signs are arranged, the differences in branding colors, the extra L’s in counsellor or traveller or jewellry. They don’t catch my attention as they did a month ago, however.  I recognize (or recognise) them as part of my surroundings and new expectations.  If I look at them directly, I see the differences and will have to “translate” in my mind accordingly.  But if I look at the whole, it appears just as it ought, looks comfortable and familiar.

I have a new routine.  I’ve had the appropriate feeling of, “I live here,” if even for a short period of time.  This is comforting and reminds me of the incredible power of the human condition for adaptation and change.  This is also challenging, because I fear now a heightened culture shock upon my return to the U.S.  Perhaps that is a good thing; perhaps it was foolish of me to consider myself somehow more able or equipped to compartmentalize my experiences in a way so as to prevent culture shock in either locale.  Perhaps that is a good thing, too, because it means I have allowed myself to be immersed here, to recognize the differences as well as the similarities, and to appreciate each on their own.

But for now: I have a new routine.  That’s all I can ask.

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