How is a routine born? As the path we earlier mentioned, one step followed by the next, and the next . . ., as a practical solution to a specific problem, or as a way of ordering the rhythms of the day, week, year, life? Every new choice or willed action may be the starting point for creating a new habit that sooner or later will turn the task into something taken for granted, as Colin Campbell (1996) has pointed out.
By turning the viewpoint and instead studying situations in which self-evident routines become visible and problematic, we may learn more about the hidden meanings of seemingly inconspicuous everyday behaviour. In situations of crisis the routines of the ordinary day are lost and may be strongly missed. In extreme situations of war and catastrophe people try to reconstruct whatever they can of normal life, but they may also discover how important some of these seemingly trivial routines were in their former lives.
Morning Routines
If you ask people about their routines, they often start with their morning habits, and this is not only because it feels like a natural start. Morning routines are about staggering from sleep to awakening, to get body and mind ready for a new day. Mornings are vulnerable times.
‘What is so loaded about morning routines?’, the sociologist Christina Nippert-Eng asked in her interview study of how Americans organize their lives between home and work. If we are preparing ourselves for a new working day, routines may work as a warming-up, she says. They ease the daily shifts between home and work. The mindless activities prepare us for the mindful ones (Nippert-Eng 1996: 113ff.). For some people this passage is always demanding, and calls for small tricks of mental reframing. Already before they have left the breakfast table the rest of the family may feel that they are long gone – mentally they are already out of the house.
One of the informants, June, needs to vacuum the kitchen floor before leaving, others keep checking their tie knot or shine their shoes in anticipation of the raid into public life. When Nippert-Eng listens to these morning stories she thinks of the anthropologist Evans-Pritchard’s classic study of the ways the Nuer used ceremonial spears that many men carried with them, not as weapons but as mental supports. Where do we find such ceremonial spears in American life, she asks, and decides on the coffee mug carried in a firm grip on the journey to work.
One could, however, have chosen other examples. Let us take up one of them: the morning routine of putting on make-up. This is a practice with complex meanings that calls for a lot of learning before it can be turned into a mechanical routine. It is also a habit charged with different content, from the daily minutes in front of the mirror, to situations where this routine becomes a very conscious and well-planned ritual, as when you are preparing for a new exciting date or an important public appearance.
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Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren