It was all so mundane.
The days were nothing more than a dull drumbeat. I’d wake up in mid-morning, run some errands, eat lunch, and head to work. Sometime close to midnight, I’d return home and go to bed — only to repeat the process the next day.
The banality of my schedule was to be expected. Indeed, a hallmark of adulthood is wading through the drudgery of repeated tasks.
But I didn’t have a regular adult life. I was a TV news producer in the middle of Texas Oil Country. My job and my life were full of novelty by design. Always never the same.
And yet, months into my role, the excitement had worn off. The monotony of my schedule dominated everything. And my job performance began to stagnate.
I was in a rut.
Now, this stagnation didn’t lead to disaster. My newscasts still hit the airwaves at 5 PM and 10 PM each day.
But behind the scenes, signs of my plateau were everywhere. I refused to listen to editorial suggestions, leading to a power struggle with a colleague on the assignments desk. I ultimately prevailed, but the experience scarred the entire newsroom.
Meanwhile, my inflexibility deprived our reporters of a chance to spread their journalistic wings. They were stuck covering the same depressing news stories day after day. “Hard news” was all that I left room for in my newscast.
It was a no-win situation for everyone.
Ultimately, it took an unforced error to snap me out of my malaise. A typo on one of my news scripts made the air, and someone threatened to sue the TV station over the blunder. I nearly lost my job.
I rebounded from this near catastrophe, rediscovering the novelty in my role. But the resurgence was short-lived.
A little more than a year after the news script gaffe, I left the news media — and Texas Oil Country —behind for good. That rut I’d gone through had put an end to my first career.
Years later, I found myself in another crisis of monotony. But this time, I hadn’t signed up for it.
The onset of a global pandemic effectively shut the world down. My office was closed. Travel was banned. And even trips to the grocery store seemed dystopian.
In an instant, my world had gotten much more insular.
At first, I was OK with this. After all, there was no cure for a proliferating virus, and we were still unclear on how it spread. Sacrificing life as we knew it in the name of safety seemed prudent.
But as the weeks dragged on, my morale dipped. I was doing the same few things day after day, all within a five-mile radius of my apartment. I hadn’t seen anyone I knew in months. And I felt increasingly trapped in a self-imposed prison, unwilling to accept the risks of exposure but unable to reckon with my diminished life.
I was in a rut once again.
I responded to this realization by doubling down on my routines. I focused even more intently on the activities I’d assigned myself during lockdown — exercising, cooking, and journaling. But even as I did this, I started to consider how things would look when the world opened again.
What would be possible? And how would those possibilities improve upon what I was doing before this scourge upended my life?
While the reality of a brighter future remained frustratingly far off, these questions kept me conscientious and motivated. And they helped me avoid languishing as the pandemic droned on.
The rut disappeared into the rearview, without collateral damage in its wake.
It’s easy to connect the dots between these two situations.
The first time I was in a rut, I didn’t handle it well. But I learned from those mistakes. And I didn’t repeat them the second time around.
Still, such generalizations miss a key point. Both times, I should have seen the rut coming, but didn’t.
This is not because I was blind. It’s because I was idealistic.
After years of hearing such advice as Follow your passion and Live to the fullest, I convinced myself that ruts didn’t exist. If I was doing what I loved, and living the way I wanted to, I would stay energized and fresh. Nothing would slow that down.
This couldn’t be further from the truth. We all fall into a rut from time to time. We need to be ready for this inevitability. And we need to know how to respond.
I mention all this because I’ve occasionally run into a rut with Words of the West. I knew this was a possibility when I started this publication years ago. And indeed, I’ve been confronted with the reality of it from time to time.
Putting my thoughts and reflections on the page is one of the joys of my life. Many weeks, the words just flow. But not always.
Sometimes, inspiration just isn’t there. Topics to write about are anything but top of mind. Motivation is lacking.
In these moments, everything seems to be telling me to pack it in. To take a break. To wait until the lightning bolt of inspiration strikes.
But I resist such urges. Instead, I experiment.
I consider the blandest themes for articles. I rethink my writing format. I change the time of the week when I put my words to paper.
It’s all up for grabs, except for one rule: I must publish whatever I come up with.
These experimental writing weeks rarely lead to Rembrandts. But they rekindle my sense of wonder. And through that wonder, I find the joy that had eluded me.
This is the key to getting out of a rut. The tactics matter less than the sensation they spark.
Finding that sensation is critical, no matter how many twists and turns it takes to get there. We have full license to be our most free, even when we feel as constrained as ever.
And that freedom? It can be a beautiful thing.
So, it’s time to change our perceptions of being in a rut. It’s not a problem. It’s an opportunity.
Act accordingly.