Creating routine from uncertainty--or maybe not

When one of my teenagers was younger, she asked, “Mom, why are you more fun than dad?” I thought for a moment and replied, “Honey, one of us has to provide stability. If you lived with just me, we might live under a bridge sometimes. It takes both of us to make our family life work. It’s all about balance.” I’m not sure the child understood what I meant, but she thought about it for a moment and didn’t ask any more questions. I still have questions, though.

Since August 2017, I have lived on my own for much of the calendar year. Like my child, I had questions about why stability was sometimes accompanied by grumpy. I was not a person who lived life on a schedule or a routine. Life was my adventure, not something to be scheduled in my phone or on a calendar somewhere. But then, I realized that an absence of routine left me feeling lost and aimless. Routine was part of my life with my family, even though the schedule was created by family life rather than by my own initiative. So, like I tend to do with all things, I made an immediate decision to create a schedule for my academic life and my personal life. And, with a few bumps, it worked. I was academically productive and personally okay.

Moving to Beijing for three months has required me to renegotiate my schedules and return to being more flexible. Things take longer here. I arrived without language skills, so my interactions are extended and fraught with uncertainty. Social expectations are different. I went to lunch yesterday with fellow professionals. In the U.S., because it was lunch and we are not well acquainted, this would generally last about an hour. Instead, we sat together eating and chatting for nearly three hours. It was very enjoyable, but definitely not what I had in my planner.

I am learning to carve out time for academic work and how to set boundaries in an unfamiliar social environment. It is a new opportunity to return to my less rigid roots and possibly to flounder for a few weeks while I adjust. Although I bristled at first and wondered how I was going to accomplish my goals without being able to plan my minutes and hours, I have decided to relax and figure that out as I go along. As I’m fond of saying to my friends in Hattiesburg, “It’s fine. It will be okay.”