When I was younger, I used to have a weird sort of chip on my shoulder about habitual behaviour, about having regular engagements, about being tied to a regular time and a place. I don’t know why exactly; I think I just thought you had to be… I don’t even know, a bit of a loser or a wee bit sad and weird to have the kind of rigidity and inflexibility that you absolutely had a place you needed to be, every time. As a youth, I think I had a kind of simmering anxiety, a Fear Of Missing Out that lead me to having a need to be ready to go at the drop of a hat.
I thought you needed to at least be able to say yes to any invite that came along (of course you didn’t need to accept everything, but you had to be able to if you wanted). I think I somehow thought less of people that lacked flexibility and rigidly blocked out time every week – ‘sorry, that’s when I have dinner with the family’ or ‘that’s the night I spend with my partner’. You know, that type of thing. Of course, there were exceptions – if you had to work, well, that sucks but that’s the way the cookie crumbles. If you had some other regular appointment of some description, well, that’s fine, I guess, but try to free yourself up a little more, yeah? You never know what sort of marvelous opportunities can crop up at a moment’s notice.
The reason I’ve come to be thinking about this is due to a conversation I had with a bartender the other night. She said that she thought it was nice that we – my trivia teammate and I – had a regular thing together. And she’s right – we’ve been going to trivia together for years now. Pandemics notwithstanding. It began as a happy accident – having not seen each other in a while, we went to a local to catch up over a burger and a few pints while we played Mario Kart 64. As it turned out, the night we’d chosen was trivia night. We did surprisingly well for a team of two and decided to give it another crack the next week. This stretched out over years, with the coming and going of a one or two other teammates and guest appearances by friends lost to other continents, the demands of work, social lives and so many children.
It has been a lasting engagement – I’m genuinely not certain when it began but it has been somewhere in the region of five years now. Win or lose, we tend to leave and let the staff close up at the pub and go for our nightcap at a neighbouring bar. As a result, we have made the acquaintance of the staff of both the pub and the bar, and very happily, have just ever so slightly extended our community. Obviously, I am under no delusions that we are best mates – I’m not so far lost to be that type of person that thinks the bartender merely being friendly is trying to flirt, or that hey this stripper really likes me, you guys. But we chat, and we learn a little of each other’s lives, and we sort each other out for drinks, and we cement a bond of community.
All because of regularity.
My negative opinions of these things were formed when I was a teenager with little oversight and even less insight. I understand now the value of knowing where you’re going to be at any given time. I understand how this is especially useful, not just in a general way for everyone but especially for the neurodiverse among us, how much it can alleviate certain anxieties to be able to fall back onto a known pathway, and to be able to see your next steps. And as I get older, I have lost (most) of the uncertainty of myself, my stupid anxieties and my need to be able to always say yes, and learned to transmute my FOMO into JOMO.
For the large part, that is. I still get a little of that fear of missing out, albeit significantly less. I schedule some things, my partner schedules way more, my friends schedule some others, and I still have room for both a little spontaneous yes-manning and a decent whack of blissful solitude and alone time.
But you see it on both sides of the bar – the habits and repeated activities, interactions and engagements that just subtly bend space around a person until they begin to fit into their environment, their community like a puzzle-piece. You can’t do that on a once-off, or as a rando. The counterargument may well be that while there is comfort to be found in routine, there is excitement to be found in new frontiers. Fair. But to that I say – porque ne los dos? I can give my Tuesdays over to pints and trivia and negronis, and conversation with an old friend and hospo hotshots. That leaves my weekends free for whatever sorts of blackjack and hooker-filled-parties crop up.
I’ll probably just spend it on the couch with the missus and the cats, though.
Exit Pursued by a Beer 
❤
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