I just had a silly epiphany today. I’m scheduled to take a Cinco de Mayo motorcycle ride for five days up to Utah and back. Four of us will ride up to Lake Las Vegas, across the San Jacintos and across the Mojave, join two others coming up fro Phoenix, and then head up through the Pinto Valley Wilderness north of Lake Mead, through the Virgin Valley Gorge to Zion, to the Lodge at Red River Ranch. We’ll spend two nights at the Lodge and use the day to ride down to Bryce Canyon along the Escalante Staircase and over Boulder Mountain. It’s one of my favorite spots on earth between Zion and the Lodge and I don’t know how many more times I will ride it, but I’m pleased to be doing it again this year with two who have ridden it before and three for whom it will be all new. That’s just the right balance to keep it all fresh but familiar. The epiphany came because I was operating on a bad visual calendar assumption. What that means is that I thought we were going next week, but the April-end calendar month screwed me up and there’s an extra week in there that I very strangely missed. During my working heyday, that sort of mistake could never happen. There are multiple reasons why that perceptional gap would have been caught almost instantly, mostly because there would have been at least a dozen calls on my schedule to remind me that the week existed and was being busily over-planned for me. But now, no one bothers with my schedule other than me. My biggest challenge is to synch my personal Apple calendar and my work Outlook calendar, something that does not happen automatically and that I have yet to figure out how to make happen seamlessly. Funny how after forty years, that famous Apple/Microsoft rift is still plaguing me.
As a side note, let me remind you of how that happened. In 1982, when I was bringing my very first “portable” computer to work, it was a Compaq, which was the first IBM-compatible portable… a luggable 28-pound machine that could run the same software as the IBM PC, which made it work compatible (IBM and Microsoft already owned the workplace). Apple had been working with Microsoft on software for the upcoming Macintosh. Excel and Word were both being developed for the Mac, and Microsoft was one of the most important early Mac developers. Jobs actively cultivated Gates and brought Microsoft into the Mac ecosystem. Then in November 1983, before the Macintosh even shipped, Microsoft announced Windows. Jobs was furious. He felt Gates had seen the Mac GUI under the cover of being a development partner and was copying it. The famous confrontation produced one of the most quoted exchanges in technology history, with Jobs accusing Gates of theft and Gates responding with a characteristically blunt reframe — that both of them had a neighbor named Xerox, and Jobs had broken in to steal the TV before Gates arrived, only to find Gates had already taken it.
I can’t really blame my calendar miss on either Gates or Jobs. I just don’t have the same scheduling monkey on my back that I used to and that is mostly a good thing. Lately I have been enjoying my mix of daily activities. I have plenty of work these days, with four active cases that I am billing on with at least one more that implies it is on the verge of reactivating and several others “on the hoof” that I am supposedly positioned well to win over. The point is, I have a portfolio of cases to work on when I choose and only modest deadline pressure. I have spring gardening tasks that are more optional than mandatory and that I truly enjoy accomplishing. In fact, after this week, my beloved Joventino will be going back to Mexico for an indefinite period of time to care for his ailing mother, so I will be forced to manage my property on my own. I will bring in Miguel for day work when I determine it’s necessary, but I will have more to do myself since Joventino just knows what to do without me telling him. And then I have my Buddy duties and my continued drive to keep exercising and building my strength to combat any muscle erosion from my reduced calorie diet. Those things and the miscellaneous socializing and the more or less monthly mini-break trips (this month SLC and SF, next month Cinco de Mayo ride, June off to Maryland, Delaware and Ithaca, and July with the grandkids off to Disneyland and Ensenada) have given me a very full daily array of activities. The question has occurred to me to wonder if that puts me in a rut…or perhaps that I’ve found a good groove.
Getting into a rut and finding your groove are two phrases that describe the same physical phenomenon, moving along a channel, but they have ended up at opposite ends of the experiential spectrum. The core distinction is that being in the groove is effortless, optimal, flowing with performance. Everything is working. You are operating at or above your usual level with less than your usual effort. Time feels different. Self-consciousness disappears. But if I’m in a rut I’m trapped in repetition. Doing the same thing over and over, not because it is working but because you cannot seem to do otherwise. Stagnant. Progress has stopped. The path has become a prison. Both images come from a groove or channel worn into a surface by repeated passage. The same physical reality, a track worn into the ground. The difference is whether the groove is working for you or against you. A groove in a vinyl record guides the needle precisely, producing music. A groove in a road guides the wheel reliably and efficiently. In these cases the groove is a refined, optimized path that makes excellent performance easier… you fall into it and it carries you. A rut in a muddy road traps the wheel, makes steering impossible, and forces you to follow a path you may not have chosen. The depth that once provided guidance now provides constraint. The groove becomes a rut when its depth transitions from helpful guidance to inescapable confinement.
Being in the groove is a state of complete absorption in a challenging activity where skill and challenge are perfectly matched, producing effortless high performance and intrinsic satisfaction, whether in expert witness work, gardening, writing or just continuing with my weight loss and workout regime. A rut is almost the inverse, the absence of appropriate challenge. The skill-to-challenge ratio would be going wrong in the other direction. The activity would be too familiar, too automatic, too undemanding to produce growth or engagement. The neural pathways would be so deeply worn that nothing new would be happening. There is also a time quality to the distinction that is worth noting. In the groove tends to be experienced in the present tense. I am in it now, it is happening. It is acute and vivid. In a rut tends to be recognized in retrospect or from the outside. I would realize that I have been in one, often after someone else points it out or after something forces a change. The rut is often invisible from inside it, which is part of what makes it a rut rather than a conscious choice.
The poignant thing about the two expressions is that one can become the other. A groove that falls into regularity can deepen over time into a rut. The groove becomes a rut not because anything external changes — the channel is the same channel — but because the relationship between you and the channel changes. What was once the right depth for guidance becomes the wrong depth for freedom. I love my groove right now. But I will stay vigilant and continue to ask myself…when does a groove become a rut?