Vox Meditantis

What part of your routine do you always try to skip if you can?

Wednesday, 12th November 2025

The kettle clicked off just as the harbour fog decided whether to lift or stay, that indecisive grey that makes the water look like it’s thinking things over. Somewhere between the steam and the first sip, the prompt floated up from the stack on my desk: What part of your routine do you always try to skip if you can?

The answer arrived with uncomfortable speed: not a chore, exactly, but a moment – the part between things.

The bit after and before

There is the day the schedule recognises: harbour walk, coffee at Marcus’s, morning clinic, notes, a late lunch that is more theory than practice, afternoon clinic, emails, a token attempt at domesticity, bed. And then there is the day as it is actually lived, which turns out to hinge on a tiny, stubborn fragment I keep trying to edit out: the five or ten unscripted minutes between roles.

The stretch between my last patient leaving and my hand reaching for the light switch. The moment between closing the office door and opening the flat door upstairs. The pause on the harbour path where I could stop and actually notice what I’m feeling, rather than cataloguing the weather like an obedient amateur meteorologist.

That’s the part I always try to skip if I can – the little, unallocated interval where there’s nothing to do and no one to look after but myself.

How a psychiatrist dodges feelings (her own)

In the consulting room, I am an evangelist for metabolising time. I tell patients that healing happens in the gaps between sessions, in the evenings when nothing much occurs, in the slow Saturdays they’re tempted to overfill. I talk about the nervous system needing space to file and sort, the way a harbour needs low tide as much as high to keep from drowning its own shoreline.

Then my last patient leaves, the door clicks shut, and some primitive part of me panics at the sudden absence of structure. Emails obligingly rush in to rescue me. Prescription refills, school reports, community committee notes, one from Maggie about the oral history project, another from Kevin about the next river clean-up. Anything will do, so long as it prevents an unmediated encounter with my own interior.

The sensible routine – breathe, notice, jot a few lines about how the day has actually affected me – gets bumped in favour of a sort of psychological tidying spree. I write meticulous clinical notes, answer messages, reorganise tomorrow, all while skipping the one thing that might actually restore me: staying still long enough to feel.

The corridor, not the door

It turns out the hardest part of any day isn’t the big doorframes – the first session, the difficult conversation, the evening plan with someone who matters. It’s the corridor leading up to them, the stretch where I can still turn back.

On Tuesday evenings now, there’s the walk from my building to the community centre watercolour class, a journey of precisely six and a half minutes if one walks like a person who has not just remembered she could stay home with a book instead. Every week, I’m tempted to take the longer harbour route “for the view,” which is really code for “maybe I’ll arrive just in time to slip into a corner and not be noticed.”

At the old church where the chamber music series runs, there is the brief space between David saying, “Shall we go in?” and my feet actually crossing the threshold. It’s the moment in which I can still default to solitude, claim a sudden email, a headache, a looming obligation, and retreat to the safety of being excellent at being alone.

The routine that wants to establish itself is simple: step into the room, sit down, allow myself to belong. The part I try to skip is everything that happens just before that – where belonging is not yet guaranteed and dignity is still on the negotiating table.

Inheritance, rewritten in miniature

My parents were virtuosos of showing up. Father drove his routes for decades, the sort of man who would rather shiver at a bus stop than leave early and disturb the timetable. Mother could turn any room into a small community within fifteen minutes, whether it was a Nevada casino floor or a New Corinth church hall.

Their routine was constancy, and they kept to it with a kind of moral seriousness. What they never learned – or never showed us, at least – was how to pause inside that constancy. They moved from duty to duty with impressive stamina, but I rarely saw them sit in a quiet room and admit to each other, let alone to the children, how the day had actually felt.

I have inherited their reliability almost intact. New Corinth can more or less set its clocks by my harbour walks and clinic hours. But I also seem to have inherited a suspicion of the unscheduled moment, the bit of time that serves no visible purpose.

Skipping those intervals keeps the performance going – Dr Bennett, reliable, composed, usefully available. It also keeps something truer from catching up with me: loneliness on certain evenings, pride I’m not supposed to admit to, the slow ache of knowing Father Walsh might yet leave for Wilmington, the fragile hope that David might be more than a pleasant addition to Thursdays.

How other people keep catching me in the act

People notice, of course. Therapists like to think we’re terribly discreet in our avoidance, but anyone who has ever waited at a bus stop knows when a driver is pretending not to see them.

Jenny, who has known me since Mrs Harper’s classroom, calls it my “vanishing trick.” At parties, she says, there’s a moment when I seem to step a half-inch backwards inside my own skin – a slight dimming – just before the conversation turns toward anything that might require more than professional disclosure. That’s the bit I try to skip: the point at which I might have to speak as Catherine rather than as a well-informed commentator on the human condition.

David has started to notice the micro-version. After concerts, there is always the doorway scene: coats on, harbour air cool against faces still full of music. He’ll say, lightly, “Tea?” and there’s a beat in which I can feel my whole nervous system looking for the EXIT sign. Recently he’s taken to adding, “You don’t have to be interesting, you know,” which is either unnervingly perceptive or an excellent guess.

Father Walsh, on our dawn walks, has stopped letting me get away with transitioning straight from silence to theology. “How are you?” he’ll ask, just as we round the point where the old shipyard comes into view, that liminal stretch where I usually begin a lecture on tides to avoid talking about anything internal. If I deflect, he lets the silence lengthen until it becomes less comfortable than simply answering the question.

The small experiment in not skipping

Lately, because these prompts are nothing if not persistent, I’ve been attempting a modest experiment: leave the in-between bits in.

Ten minutes between the last patient and the notes: no email, no rearranging of tomorrow, no heroic productivity. Just sitting in the Victorian light, listening to the harbour traffic, allowing the day to register. Sometimes that means admitting that a particular story has shaken me more than I’d like, or that I’m more tired than the diary suggests I have any right to be. Sometimes it’s just boredom, which is its own kind of luxury.

On Tuesdays, I’ve stopped taking the long way round to watercolour. Instead, I walk the direct route and let the discomfort be part of the evening: the feeling of entering a room where I’m not the expert, holding the door for the woman with better brushes, acknowledging that I am here on purpose, not by accident.

After concerts, I’m practising not rushing the threshold. Letting there be a minute on the church steps where the night is cool and the question “Tea?” doesn’t have to be answered immediately. Sometimes I still say no. Increasingly, I hear myself say, “Yes, but you’re drying up,” which is my clumsy way of accepting both the invitation and the vulnerability it entails.

What the skipped bit is really about

Underneath the urge to skip lies a familiar superstition: if I move quickly enough from one role to the next, perhaps I can avoid the cost of any of them. If I never stand alone in the office after a hard session, I won’t have to feel how much it asks of me. If I don’t linger in the doorway with someone I’m beginning to care for, I won’t have to risk wanting more than is currently guaranteed.

The clinical term would be avoidance. The human term is fear. Fear that if I pause, something unmanageable will surface – grief, desire, anger, regret – and there will be no convenient professional script to tuck it back in.

What I keep remembering – on good days, at least – is what I’ve told countless patients: the feelings we sprint past don’t disappear; they simply wait for quieter corridors. They show up as Sunday insomnia, or sudden tears in the grocers over fennel bulbs, or a sharp jealousy you didn’t expect to feel when your brother describes his noisy, ordinary household.

The part worth keeping

So yes, the part of my routine I always try to skip, if I can, is the small, unstructured pause – the bit with no witness and no obvious utility. The five minutes in which I am not quite anyone’s doctor, not yet anyone’s friend, not officially alone, not quite accompanied.

But increasingly, it feels like that’s where the real adjustments happen. Where the day’s stories settle into something more integrated. Where I can notice that I actually enjoyed the class despite my terrible horizon lines, or that I am quietly pleased to see David’s name on my phone, or that the possibility of Father Walsh leaving hurts more than my professional detachment would prefer.

It’s where I remember that my life isn’t only the list of things done, but also the spaces in which I let what’s been done touch me.

I haven’t stopped trying to skip those moments. Habit is tenacious, and avoidance has served me well enough to make a career. But some evenings now, the harbour is dark, the office is quiet, and I find myself staying in the room a little longer than necessary, hand resting on the back of the patients chair after they’ve gone.

Just long enough to notice that I’m still here. And that, perhaps, is a routine I’d rather learn to keep.

Catherine

P.S. To the stalwarts who notice timestamps – yes, this one limped in late. The evening Internet in my corner of New Corinth chose repeatedly to “pause for buffering,” which, given today’s meditation on skipped pauses, feels like the universe indulging in heavy-handed irony. Consider this entry, then, a collaborative effort between my router and my resistance to empty space. Thank you, as ever, for waiting in the doorway with me.

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.