There’s nothing better than being surprised by your common routine.
I have an exhausting routine a few days of the week where I wake up at six, go to work, and then go to the gym afterwards.
With this schedule I usually don’t get home until 10 PM, so this routine is what I call a day-long commitment. It’s a ritual similar to a wedding, only instead of the life-long commitment of ups and downs, this is a sixteen hour re-run that airs each day I try it. The work/gym beast plays like a DVD on repeat — a long stressful day at work, a curious pondering of the meaning behind the word why? on the train, and then a 30 minute run followed by whatever strength training I can squeeze in with my remaining energy.
But today I was surprised. After completing my workout, I walked into a near empty locker room. By 10:50 PM, all of the common gym hacks were gone. The awkward jogging couples were long home, as were the “look at my body” women (who obviously had eating disorders because their ten minute walks at the gym were not enough for such bodies). Even the forty year-old macho men were gone, and these are the elite macho men who still believe they can roll like the Travolta’s of the 70’s and still come up big in the dating game of life. No, by 10:50, it was an empty locker room with two others quicky changing so they could get home.
Only this time, the speaker system played “All The Things That I’ve Done,” by The Killers.
The song is a call for arms against regret. It’s an impossibly optimistic song that says ‘forget it, if there’s nowhere else to run, I’m throwing my gloves down and leaving the fight, and I’ll be happier because of it’. Sometimes life shouldn’t be about conflict and guilt.
Today, during my routine of monotony, I walked into the locker room and started singing just as the song kicked off. It wasn’t like me but somehow it happened. My volume stayed low, but still loud enough so that I could here the many imperfections of my singing voice. It was enough to make the melody alive, enough for me to realize that were this ten minutes later, and I was in my car driving home, I’d wail the song to the audience of old groceries and unread Rolling Stone magazines in my car.
But no, that’s not enough too break up the monotony of my routine. I often find secret pleasures in life’s little things - such as the melody of a good song or even the angle the sun shines on a building. This time was different.
As I walked into the dressing room, still breathing hard from my run, I heard my voice echo off the walls. Yet I wasn’t singing loud enough for it to occur. Placing down my used t-shirt, i saw that the person behind me was singing as well — equally as quiet as my own voice.
We sang together both pretending we didn’t realize the other was singing, in the form of a silent secret companionship that only The Killers and a forgotten part of our minds could play a part in.
As the song concluded with the chanting of “I’ve got soul / But I’m not a soldier” over and over again, the meaning of the tune was just as powerful as it was at the band’s concert at in Central Park, where it was the closing track. At that concert the final lines represented our distaste for the Iraq war, but tonight it was something different.
In the monotony of life we’ve still got our soul and we shouldn’t forget that. Don’t let the tediousness of life get you down. Put down the gloves and hold onto your life.
As the song ended I closed my locker, left the gym, and began the trip to my new apartment.
