Traveling and Scheduling

I am rediscovering that I am a creature of schedules and habit.

One thing that traveling always does for (to?) me is that it shakes me out of the schedule I have arranged for my life. One might say on the macro side it is good: it helps one to see new things and expand one's world. However, on the micro side, it's terrible.

Over the course of the last two years I have carefully worked to find the optimal schedule for my time away when I'm not work. My mornings have fluctuated only a little over the last two years, my evenings more so. It's an attempt on my part to practice the most important things I have in my life given the time that I have available. Within a hair's breath (and given enough sleep the night before) I have created a fairly detailed list of what I need to do in the morning and even can (with a fair degree of accuracy) tell you what I am doing given at a particular time.

Traveling changes that, of course. And not only during the actual traveling experience. What I have found is that it disrupts my schedule for up to a week after - not just in missed sleep (which seems to happen all to frequently) but in trying to re-establish my routine in the morning. It's almost as if my "routine equilibrium" was so disorganized that it takes a while for my inner self to refind its balance and get reset.

It's troubling, of course, because I always tend to lose the progress I've made as I try to re-establish what I was doing. And it's interesting to me, because I may be more usual - or maybe unusual - than I thought: where many people wither on routine, I thrive.