I’m always eating breakfast. Or lunch. Or dinner. Or I am sitting at the table, snacking on milk and cookies.
Constantly, I am brushing my teeth, getting dressed, going to bed. And wakng up.
Or I am forever swimming, walking home from the Square, taking out the trash.
There I am, perched before my computer, filling the screen with new material, reading email, some of it dubious. Why is that unknown woman from Nigeria always telling me the sad story of her family and urging me to send funds to an address she encloses?
Morning is always breaking and I am unlocking the front door, going out on the porch, and picking up the daily newspapers. This habit, widely abandoned by those under a certain undefined age, remains ingrained in me. Old Gutenberg did not serve us so badly, I still believe.
Alternatively, I am anxiously opening a library book eager to read history and literature. I rest back in the easy chair, not immune to the effects of an afternoon slump.
Afternoon wanes and I am making my favorite drink. Bourbon plus sweet vermouth with a cherry floating on top equals a Manhattan, the closest I will get to that favorite destination today.
Add taking pills to the list of habitual activities. For most of the past decades, I was immune to this requirement. But now my membership in the vast drug-taking conspiracy of America is firmly established.
Do you have sensations like this or is it just me?
You may think the response to these experiences can be put simply: I’m in a rut. You might prescribe a long vacation, a trip around the world, or some other radical change.
What these sensations mean to me, however, is more than that. I have lived a long time. There has been ample occasion for me to have done all those habitual things countless times over.
As of last August, I had lived 28,835 days. This computes to 692,040 hours, the majority of which found me awake. That’s a lot of time to have done many of the same basic things over and over. 
I have become inured to hundreds of actions that go to make up a more or less ordered life. The daily schedule stretches far back into the past and has become ongoing. If you have my mental make-up, there is no escaping these habitual actions. Nor do I want to.
But I have discovered how to milk certain routine actions for added worth. Swimming, for example, can serve as a time for thinking. You can reflect on situations, and sometimes find answers to problems.
Walking also serves reflection, not just on the world as you pass by, observing it. This exercise also promotes insight, even prayer on occasion. The church and academic bells you hear in passing stir thinking about transience.
Fortunately I am never bored. The world is too filled with fascinating people and events for that to happen. And technology. Ever since I bought my first computer, the old Commodore 64, and words from it flashed on my hooked-up television screen, I realized that boredom had been exorcised from my world for the duration.
I also welcome change, at least sometimes. Don’t ask me to give up my routine of daily exercise, however. Nor regular talk sessions with certain friends, and many other habits. To surrender these quotidian activities would mean loss of something precious.
For many of my age peers, it seems, time moves slowly. If you can believe reports, the passage of days for them does not resemble my description.
Having a deadline for this column admittedly speeds the flight of each week for me. The chosen need to produce some 800 words of readable prose every Friday induces “time’s winged chariot” to fly faster.
But other people share this sense of time gathering speed in later life. They are surprised by the arrival of another Christmas, a new New Year, yet another birthday. 
Looking back down the years, you can see the present patterns of activity in somewhat different forms. Reflecting on the past, everyone can find both continuity and discontinuity.
Some stretches of time I regret. Those years in which I listened to dull lectures, not a few of them in Latin, seem wasted. But “wasted’ as a category demands scrutiny. That long-ago regimen was the product of a certain time and place now, long after the fact, impervious to change.
These musings of an increasingly longevitous elder of the community may reverberate in you. If they suggest richness, that’s what I have in mind. The daily repetitions, like so much else, belong to the mystery of human existence.
We are, and therefore we do. And much of what we do we have done before. But the next times we do them may hold the surprise of new insights.
                                                                                                 Richard Griffin