The Thing About Life Rules
Is that they’re more like rules for this month, or for this week, or for the next two hours.
Image: A scan of the yellowing Art Department Rules at Immaculate Heart College, written by Sister Corita Kent. There are ten rules, urging students and teachers to consider everything an experiment, be self-disciplined, be happy and so on. The letters are all wonky and uneven, in open defiance of the established principles of typography.
The middle of November is an unusual time to begin an academic year, but of course that didn’t keep me from partaking in such time-honoured traditions as creating folders, scrutinising syllabi, and indiscriminately consuming the considerable archives of Raul Pacheco Vega’s academic writing blog.
I might have left behind the siren call of new stationery, but I’m still an explorer in the swamps of doing-things-advice. This time I was seeking a simple but functional method of organising my research, reading notes and drafts (my tentative solution is creating digital index cards a la Umberto Eco, but that’s a post for another day).
At regular intervals my grandmother half-laughs half-complains about the confusion around elementary questions such as whether an egg a day leads to death at forty or rosy cheeks at eighty. Any student would feel the same about the barrage of well-meaning and sometimes contradictory principles, systems, tools, workflows, advice, jargon, tips, life rules, techniques, habits, books, YouTube videos, creativity guides, self-help articles, morning routines, growth mindsets, software, scientific research, and the entire industry of slightly-better-than-garbage variations on the same old productivity hacks. Take it from someone who has spent four or five years trying to keep up—this is all a bit much.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s genuinely good stuff out there—tools like bullet journaling that have helped me hit deadlines (or figure out why I was missing them), names for the things I didn’t know I was doing (pseudo-work), the struggles of famous dead people (and some living ones) and the ever-welcome reassurance that messy is okay. You might stumble upon one very profound thought, an insight that illuminates your planning process, or a snippet that never fails to motivate you. I do love these (and in fact, I compile what works for me in a literal user manual for Johanna.exe). But even this selective approach can quickly become overwhelming.
Let’s say you’re told to ‘live what you believe in’. That sounds like a good idea. Then a few days (or minutes, if you’ve opened a lot of tabs) later, you find another nugget of wisdom—‘find real deadlines that scare you’. Someone tells you to ‘plan, plan, plan’, someone else says to follow the idea that’s been nagging you, what you’re still thinking of when you wake up in the morning. Your daily reflection leads to the principle ‘don’t let yourself down’. And so on and so forth, ad infinitum.
Now all of these ideas are floating around in your consciousness, and you’re feeling a little guilty for letting some (or all) of them slip. It’s madness.
There is no way to condense all this advice into a simple formula that you can plug in and forget about. The principles you use to organise your work and make decisions need constant adjustment. This seemed reasonable, but I did not like it at all.
Art Assignment once made a video about Sister Corita Kent, a nun and art teacher who wrote the famous ‘10 Rules for Students and Teachers’. She lays down unorthodox principles for a creative life (like ‘find a place you trust, and then, try trusting it for a while’), principles which would certainly lead to discovery and joy, but as the video went on, I sank further and further into gloom. There was no way I could ever keep up with her advice. It was a project doomed to fail. And so I despaired, through injunctions to experiment, to be self-disciplined, to be happy, all the way until the last sentence, which was perhaps the most important part: ‘There should be new rules next week.’
Image: Sister Corita Kent
It is difficult to sum it up in one word but the closest is 'RELATABLE'. I end up revamping my routine every alternate week. It disturbs my stability but keeps boredom away. I admired and tried to replicate routine planners and journal keepers but that didn't work out well for me. I have often been impressed by the daily Rituals or self help things but the inflexibility of these routines gives me serious anxiety issues. So honestly I try to follow some small habits or routines and change them as well once I hit a plateau. A Gym instructor once told me that we need to keep changing our exercise regime every two weeks because if the body gets used to it, it will stop reacting to the effects of the exercise. I guess that is applicable for other things as well.
Gratitude journals are great! But they don't work for me. I mean a cool mix of gratitude and Cribbing journals work the best for me. I need to crib to let it out and then be thankful for having someone hear me out as well.
P.s- I am not going to stop the habit of reading this substack with my cup of coffee every morning.
P.p.s- This is not to stress you out to post every single week but it's always cool to sit down with my cup of coffee and read this