Even Freedom Becomes a Routine
[sitting on the balcony in Singapore, watching the city wake up...]
Today marks 7 years since I retired… I still can’t believe I made that announcement on father’s day in 2019. During men’s mental health month.
So many thoughts and emotions have been running through me this week… but I decided to process everything I was feeling by just… “people watch”.
Everyone I saw this week was heading somewhere.
I did not know where.
I just knew they were heading somewhere.
Strangers, most of them. Some were walking. Some were running. Some were driving. Some were on motorbikes weaving through traffic. Some were on public transit, looking at their phones. Some were lying on the grass and they were heading somewhere too … I could tell by their faces. The body was still. The mind was already ahead.
I watched them for a while.
I did not ask any of them where they were going. I did not have the courage. Or the urgency. Or whatever it is that gives a stranger permission to ask another stranger an honest question in public.
I just watched.
Each of them on a route I could not see, walking a path I had no map for, living inside a head I would never enter.
And I thought, for the first time in a long time, about Ecclesiastes.
The Preacher noticed the same thing I noticed. Three thousand years ago.
He sat somewhere … probably a window, probably warm and looked out at his own version of the city. And he wrote this:
The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rose.
The wind goes toward the south, and turns about unto the north; it whirls about continually.
All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full; unto the place from which the rivers come, there they return again.
He was watching routines.
The sun has one. The wind has one. The rivers have one. The generations have one. The eye, the ear, the body … each running their assigned circuit routine, day after day, century after century, while the man at the window watches and tries to find one thing that is actually new.
He could not find one.
There is no new thing under the sun, he wrote.
I think about that line a lot lately.
I used to be against routines. Totally, against them!
I thought I was too restless for them. Too ambitious. Too alive. I thought routines were what other people did … people who had given up, people who had settled, people who were boring, people who had stopped asking for more from their lives than the cycle they were inside.
So I broke mine.
And I left.
And I built a new life in another country.
And it took me about two years to realize I had not actually escaped anything. I had just replaced one routine I was tired of with another routine I would eventually become tired of. The setting was different. The rhythm was the same.
You may be reading this letter thinking you need a big change in your life right now. But I want you to know that:
The next city becomes a routine.
The new job becomes a routine.
The marriage becomes a routine.
The business becomes a routine.
Even freedom becomes a routine if you live in it long enough.
The thing so many of us are running from is not repetition.
It is disappointment.
You think a new chapter will eliminate the feeling that something is missing. You think a different environment will produce a different internal world.
But Ecclesiastes is brutally honest.
The sun still rises.
The wind still blows.
The rivers still run.
And somehow, despite all that repetition, creation does not complain.
Only humans do.
We are the only part of creation constantly trying to escape the very thing that makes life possible.
Rhythm.
Maybe the goal is not to break the cycle.
Maybe the goal is to become conscious inside it.
This thought stayed with me as I watched strangers this week.
Each person heading somewhere.
Chasing something.
Building something.
Recovering from something.
Trying to become someone.
And for a moment, I felt connected to all of them.
Because beneath all our different destinations, most of us are asking the same questions.
Am I behind?
Did I miss my moment?
Should I have chosen differently?
Is this all there is to life?
Am I becoming who I was supposed to become?
Maybe you are asking one of those questions today. Maybe you are lying in bed right now wondering why the thing you prayed for no longer feels the way you thought it would.
If that is you, I want to leave you with something that has helped me.
Do not judge your life only by what is changing. Judge it by what is growing.
Growth often looks repetitive.
Growth looks like showing up again.
Making another call.
Having another conversation.
Being present for another ordinary day.
The oak tree and the river both look repetitive until you measure them over time. Then you realize they were becoming something the entire time.
Seven years after retiring, I am no longer trying to escape every routine.
I pay more attention to what the routine is producing.
Because the question is not whether you are in a cycle.
You are.
We all are.
The question is whether the cycle is slowly shaping you into the person you were meant to become.
And if you are not sure today, give yourself some grace. Because the Preacher in Ecclesiastes would laugh, kindly, if he was here.
He would say to us: welcome to under the sun.
***
I am writing this letter on a balcony.
I will probably write the next one from somewhere else.
I will tell you where I am each time. Not for content.
Not for brand.
But because I want you to know there was a man in a body in a place when these letters were written. A man who looked up, breathed in the air, and noticed what the Preacher noticed.
And here’s the last thing I want you to take with you:
You are allowed to watch.
You are allowed to be still.
You are allowed to see the world without rushing to be part of it.
The city moves fast. The world moves fast. And everyone else is always heading somewhere.
But for a moment, just this moment, you can sit. You can notice.
You can rest in the recognition that your mind can wander, your body can pause, and your soul can breathe.
Because that pause … that quiet space … is where the new understanding begins.
It’s where you meet yourself again.
And that is enough for now.
I will write you next Sunday.
Gold,
p.s. if you haven’t read my manifesto yet, run over to my house and read it quietly.