Living Patterns

Hi, 

I have been thinking a lot about routines this week. Specifically, I have been thinking about the strength of routines and how to protect the most crucial rhythms in our lives. 

Much of this incubation was spurred on by getting sick and not being able to maintain my normal daily flow.

On most weekdays, I try to be out of bed by 4:45am so that I can use that early morning Neuroplasticity to my advantage. Most of the time that looks like doing some reading, doing prep for the day, or writing. 

This week because of the illness, I was having a hard time falling asleep and staying asleep so I opted to sleep in until about 7:15am each day. Completely missing my sacred morning routine. 

I was still able to capture some of that morning spark, but it was severely diminished, partially in part to the fogginess from the cold. 

Something interesting happened after about 4 days, I was looking forward to waking up early again. I was longing for my early creative time. 

This was really exciting for me. My biggest fear was that I would get out of rhythm and I wouldn’t be able to snap back into it, but the longing was an indicator that it had become something more than waking up early. It has become a part of the pattern for how I live my day. 

Living Patterns

I am reading a book called The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander, where he said a quote that I cannot shake, “When one pattern is alive, it resolves its own forces, its self-sustaining, self-creating, and its internal forces continuously support themselves.”

Routines, patterns, flows, however you want to frame them, they are all pretty much synonymous. 

It got me thinking about what are the living patterns in my life, and what are the dead ones. 

All so I could answer this question, routines not only help us sustain ourselves, but could routines sustain themselves?

I am aware that by referring to patterns as living and dead, I am getting dangerously close to just talking about good and bad habits. 

The difference between a pattern and a habit is that a pattern is a macro event where a habit is a micro event. For example, everyone on the earth has the pattern of going to sleep. The habits that surround this pattern are what makes more living rather than more dead. 

This illustration also shows that living and dead patterns live on a spectrum. Some patterns in your life are more alive than other’s, but that doesn’t mean that the patterns that are less alive are in fact not alive. 

I promise this isn’t talking in circles, this will all come together. 

Living patterns versus routines may be a clunkier framing from a communication perspective, but there is also a perspective that living patterns offers us that routines doesn’t have intuitively. 

The Stages of Life

By the nature of something being alive, we assume that it can be born. Thus, we can look at living patterns at different stages of the developmental process. 

When you are trying to generate a new living pattern in your life, you are able to treat it with the same grace that you would treat a new born child. Of course that pattern isn’t able to support itself, it doesn’t even know what it needs to be supported. 

So what do we do for other infantile beings? 

We teach them things, we hire teachers or tutors, we hire people to help us look after them, or a whole other hoist of child rearing things people do. 

We recognize that developing a living thing through infancy to adolescence to maturity is a process. 

The same goes for living patterns. 

You want to instill a daily pattern for movement and are having a hard time with motivation, hire a personal trainer. 

You want to learn Spanish? Get a 1000 day streak on Duolingo or hire a tutor.  

When you are building a new living pattern, treat yourself like a literal child. 

Here is the best part.

When you are building new patterns in your life. Your other more mature patterns can pick up the slack for your pre-pubescent patterns. You get up everyday at 6am and make breakfast? Can that pattern withstand getting up 30 minutes earlier so you have guaranteed time to move? Probably. 

The age old adage of “it takes a village” applies to living patterns in your own life too. 

I want to take a pause and talk about mature living patterns. I think it would be easy to leave them be, but I think there is an important note specifically for them.

Living things like community.

If you have been exercising 4 times a week for 10 years, consider going to a workout class or working with a personal trainer, not so that you can reaffirm the pattern, but so that you can bring new life into the pattern. 

Additionally, even mature patterns still face resistance. 

Steven Pressfield has the best description I can find of what resistance does to you, "Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work".

If we are leaning on our mature patterns to support our younger ones, we can also look for ways to take pressure off our mature patterns to give them the flexibility to serve in other areas. 

The Purpose of Living Patterns

All of this is fine and good, but you are probably wondering, why build living patterns in the first place? 

You would be hard pressed to find someone anywhere who would say that the best things are built in an afternoon and not over a long period of time. 

The greatest things that we can build are the things that we show up day in and day out to build. The living patterns are the daily flows that allow you to show up and put forward the effort necessary to accomplish your large task. 

Showing up everyday offers you a unique advantage more than just having the most hours on specific problem. It offers you something that Kes Sampanthar and Scott Wolfson talk about called your fluke surface area. 

The idea is essentially that the more outputs you put into your chosen arena the more chances you have catching a fluke. It is the same logic of believing the person with the most lottery tickets has the best chance at winning the lottery. 

Living patterns not only help you get a lot of work done over a long period of time, but they also give you the best chance at getting lucky in your domain. 

The simplest modern cliche is that it takes 10 years to be an overnight success. 

I know that much of this newsletter has been about living patterns through the lens of success, but the overarching purpose of living patterns is to help you live the life that you want to live. 

A life with a pasture of living patterns that are being carefully cultivated self-sustains itself. A life with a wasteland of dead patterns steals from your health, relationships, and your perspective. 

In both lives, energy is being spent. The living scenario allows you to spend energy towards what could happen where the dead scenario leaves you spending energy just to survive. 

Both are hard. 

I am trying to approach these more like essays, let me know if you like the different style. 

Kyle