Ryu's Blog

An interesting book on the rituals/routines of many famous artists. Different routines work for different people. There are those who like to work in the morning and those who can only work at night; those who prefer a simple, uncluttered life and those who prefer more chaos and spontaneity; or those who always feel compulsive to work and those who are more relaxed.

To me, the most attractive (and surprisingly common) lifestyle are those who follow a rather simple yet balanced routines. The day goes something like this: make breakfast, work intensely for a couple of hours, have lunch and take a walk, work a few more hours, maybe take another walk, have dinner, socialize and relax at night (listen to music, play games, read, etc.).

Excerpts:

The book’s title is Daily Rituals, but my focus in writing it was really people’s routines. The word connotes ordinariness and even a lack of thought; to follow a routine is to be autopilot. But one’s daily routine is also a choice, or a whole series of choices. In the right hands, it can be a finely calibrated mechanism for taking advantage of a range of limited resources: time (the most limited resource of all) as well as willpower, self-discipline, optimism. A solid routine fosters a well-worn groove for ones’ mental energies and helps stave off the tyranny of moods.

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“My experience has been that most really serious creative people I know have very, very routine and not particularly glamorous work habits,” [John] Adams said in a recent interview. “Because creativity, particularly the kind of work I do–which is writing large-scale pieces, either symphonic music or opera music–is just, it’s very labor-intensive. And it’s something that you can’t do with an assistant. You have to do it all by yourself.”

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[Filmmaker Claude Lanzmann talking about her lover Simone de Beauvoir] — There were no parties, no receptions, no bourgeois values. We completely avoided all that. There was the presence only of essentials. It was an uncluttered kind of life, a simplicity deliberately constructed so that she could do her work.

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Character, for [Immanuel] Kant, is a rationally chosen way of organizing one’s life, based on years of varied experience–indeed, he believed that one does not really develop a character until age forty. And at the core of one’s character, he thought, were maxims–a handful of essential rules for living that, once formulated, should be followed for the rest of one’s life.

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[William James] — The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.

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“I don’t think that my life style is like most other people’s and I’m rather glad for that,” [Glenn] Gould told an interviewer in 1980. “[T]he two things, life style and work, have become one. Now if that’s eccentricity, then I’m eccentric.” In another interview, Gould described his preferred schedule: I tend to follow a very nocturnal sort of existence, mainly because I don’t much care for sunlight. Bright colors of any kind depress me, in fact, and my moods are more or less inversely related to the clarity of the sky on any given day.