Pattern and Routine

This is an automatic translation of the Korean original.

I admire Ichiro Suzuki, and Haruki Murakami. To put it more precisely, I regard their lives as a kind of horizon. Ironically, both are Japanese; perhaps it is part of a DNA embedded deep in their culture.

The reason I admire them is rather simple. It is their spare routines, which stand in such contrast to the astonishing things they have achieved. They are people who have made real, in a modern way, the wonder that the word "routine" can reach. Sport and the novel, a dynamic profession and a static one, words that at a glance share nothing, but as always, the principle follows a single path.

A few vivid memories cross my mind. A scene from a documentary on Ichiro Suzuki, and Haruki Murakami's daily timetable. His wife opening the refrigerator to show the curry she had frozen, Ichiro's smile as he says you must not put tonkatsu on curry, and then his plain figure eating the curry again. It is a single moment in a documentary, but with nothing to add or take away, every instant flows according to his will.

I have never met Murakami on screen, but through his essay collection "Novelist as a Vocation" I was able to meet him, if only in imagination. Six months for the first draft, ten months for revision, and the astonishingly spare daily schedule that supports the whole process of writing. At its center were exercise, jazz, and reading.

I did not raise this subject to deliver the dry message that one must work hard, or that routine is what brings success. At the end of a routine there may be failure, or tragedy may be waiting. The reason for making a pattern of life and setting it as a routine is simple.

It is to own "time."

The essence of owning is holding the "initiative." Giving texture to formless time through my will, my intellect, and my awareness. Defining a vocation for myself, building a strict pattern through it, and gaining the chance to explore myself within that structure. And continuing, through routine, to carve the marble block of the self.

What pattern will I make? What routine will I build through that pattern? Am I ready to set a pattern and routine professionally? And can I face myself within it?

I believe that at the end of a human life there is, inevitably, loneliness. Loneliness is a passive word. To turn it into the active word "solitude," I think two ingredients are needed.

One is "the accumulation of the senses," and the other, "pattern and routine."
I recommend the Ichiro documentary, and Haruki Murakami's "Novelist as a Vocation."