Do It Again. Do It Again. Do It Again.

How our fear of the mundane is robbing us of joy.

Wake up. Eat breakfast. Go to work - or class - and come home again. Make dinner, eat dinner, back to bed. Wake up the next morning and start all over again.

The sun rises, shines for awhile, and sets. The next morning, it all begins again.

Trees sprout new leaves, spend all summer bright green, only to burst with orange hues and fall off every autumn. Next spring, they’ll do it all again.

Have you ever felt bored with life? Maybe you’ve noticed the repetitiveness of it all, or perhaps, you’ve not noticed it but you feel it creeping in the shadows of your thoughts. I sure have. Perhaps, like me, you’ve decided the solution is to change something about your life or your routine: maybe a small change, like the time you wake up, or perhaps something more significant, like moving to a different state. While there are many good and worthwhile changes we can make in our lives, what if we’ve been robbing ourselves of long-term beauty because we’re simply too impatient?

Think of the first time you learned to pitch a baseball, play a scale on the piano, or write the letter G. You probably didn’t do it very well, did you? Yet, time after time, repetition after repetition, you became pretty skilled. I don’t think many of us argue the value of repetition for learning a new skill or hobby—yet, I think the greater value of repetition is in the very parts of our lives we fear it most: our mundane daily habits. It’s not just so we can get better at making coffee or folding the laundry. No, I think the repetition in our normal-people lives is actually shaping us into someone; if we’re not careful, we might not want to become that someone.

A few months ago, I started to catch myself turning into a whining complainer due to a new repetition in my life. When my husband and I first moved into our new apartment, we were immediately faced with more traffic on our commute to the gym than we experienced in the other places we’d each lived. Admittedly, I was frustrated right away. Why would I want to spend so much time each week just driving to and from the gym? Yet, this was the gym we wanted to go to, so every Tuesday and Thursday evening we’d hop in the truck and settle in for the drive. For the first month or so, I would let myself get all worked up about it, thinking of all the things I could be doing instead of driving to the gym, and getting a touch of road rage each time we got stopped by a red light.

As Aristotle said many centuries ago, we are what we repeatedly do. If I spend a solid 3% of my waking hours complaining, it may not seem like much, but it will seep into other areas of my life. What if I spent that 3% of time appreciating the beauty of the trees along the roadside, or learning about what my husband enjoys at his job, or simply enjoying some time to sit back and not be worried about the infinite number of things I could manufacture for my to-do list?

Think about areas of your life where you’ve let yourself become less than you should be due to repetition. Perhaps you always have family dinner together, but you get impatient with your little sister for always talking too much. Maybe you feel like you’ll lose your mind if you have to go to one more lecture with that one professor. Or, you find yourself losing the joy in the weekly team meeting you have at work (if you even had joy to begin with.) What happens after five, ten, twenty years of impatience at dinner, complaining about boredom, or unchecked frustration at work?

It’s not just our appreciation for the mundane that’s at risk here; it’s the very fabric of our lives. If we cannot learn to appreciate the repetitiveness of our lives, we will live our lives in one of two ways, neither positive: either 1) we incessantly pursue new and seemingly exciting things, and in doing so, fail to accomplish anything worthwhile anywhere, or 2) we continue our daily repetition but with a resentful spirit. If most of what we do each day is repeated the next, the penalty for being disappointed with our days is realizing we’re disappointed with our entire life.

If you’ve been following The Next Step for awhile, this is right about where you’d expect one of my little “here are a few things I’ve learned about how to appreciate repetition” lists. Yet, I’m so early on this journey myself, I don’t have a neat package tied with a bow for us. Still, I wanted to invite you into this reflection with me because of how much I’ve felt convicted lately of how crucial it is for us to understand the gravity of how we approach the mundane.

While I don’t have a list of steps, I wonder if one of the ways we can learn to appreciate our daily reps is by un-labeling things. It’s not just a sunrise; that’s a wildly beautiful painting in the sky. It’s not just a cup of coffee; that’s a mug full of captivating scent and the boost of energy we can use to create something good for the world today. It’s not just your customer; it’s an image-bearer of the God of the universe, and you get to help them solve a problem today.

What type of people might we become if we approached our “boring” daily lives with wonder, looking for the beauty in the day that others miss? What type of wives, brothers, parents, friends might we become? Perhaps instead of adding to the concentration of complaints and negative emotions in the world, we could actually tip the scales in a meaningful way, appreciating our families and workplaces in a new way. What if—and this is the greatest gift of all—we could become more accurate reflections of our Creator by expressing joy instead of misery at repetition?

I’d like to leave you with a quote from the author G.K. Chesterton:

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but he has never got tired of making them. It may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

It is a matter of both temporal and eternal importance that you and I learn the beauty of repetition. Will you join me in the pursuit?

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Journal Prompt of the Week

Where do you struggle to appreciate the mundane? What’s one thing you can do this week to start finding joy in your daily repetition?