stories on Routines

The award-winning and now venerable filmmaker Wim Wenders recently put out a new movie called “Perfect Days.” It was filmed in Japan and follows the daily life of Hirayama, a cleaner of public t...

In 1889, the French novelist Paul Bourget penned The Disciple , where he depicted the life of a renowned philosopher and psychologist, whose existence was marked by a seemingly monotonous routine...

Have you ever seen As Good As It Gets, the late-nineties film starring Jack Nicholson? In it, Nicholson plays a cranky, misanthropic writer in New York City, snapping at anyone who crosses his p...

In this excerpt by a Welsh Farmer, Wilf Davies, we hear about someone who finds his routines life-giving, as opposed to soul-sucking. I can’t help but think it has something to do with his occupation,...

I read somewhere that in the early days of the Alaska Highway, tractor-trailer trucks would make deep ruts in the gravel as they carried construction equipment to boomtowns up north. Someone posted th...

Sometimes service means doing routine tasks even if we could have someone else do them. There is a story about Abraham Lincoln – possibly apocryphal but certainly in character – that a cabinet member ...

Parker Palmer’s book Let Your Life Speak arrested my heart a few years back. It begins with a poem by William Stafford, “Ask Me”, that begs this question: “Some time when the river is ice ask me mista...