It’s 4:30 am and I am wide awake.

Well maybe not “wide awake” but up anyway.

I was thinking the other day about patterns. Patterns that we get into with our lives that really limit our movement forward. Watching TV at night is a pattern. We have our favorite shows and since they are serialized, we watch from week to week to keep up with the lives of the charactures we have come to know.

It is like a modern day “catharsis”.

According to the dictionary, catharsis is:

1.the purging of the emotions or relieving of emotional tensions, esp. through certain kinds of art, as tragedy or music.

In other words, instead of living our lives through ourselves and the stuff that happens to us on a daily basis, we live them through the actors who are paid to keep us entertained and emotionally satisfied.

A pattern is:

1. A consistent, characteristic form, style, or method, as:
   1. A composite of traits or features characteristic of an individual or a group: one’s pattern of
      behavior.

Winter time in the mountains brings with it a pattern. The days get shorter and colder and the things that we did during the good weather, we stop doing.

We don’t take our evening walks because it’s dark after dinner.

There are other things we can do to occupy our time but in order to do them we have to create new patterns. In other words, we have to have a plan, a goal, a destination.

But what happens a lot is we just let the TV entertain us. After a long day at work…it’s nice to just chill because we are emotionally drained and all that.

It is hard to come home every night and eat dinner and then spend a few hours writing the next great american novel. That takes real planing and dedication. But if we only wrote for 15 minutes an evening, at the end of the year we would have 5,475 minutes logged. That’s 91.25 hours of writing…more than two work weeks. Can one write the next great amercian novel in 92 hours…I doubt it but it’s a start.

That’s one reason I started this blog. It’s a new pattern…something to get me out of the old patterns. I started it knowing that at the end of a certain point of time I would have a journal of thoughts and stuff. However, you can only be so honest in a blog. So the “real” stuff must still be journaled in a book.

And that’s sounding a lot like work and TV is looking even more appealing….but you know what I mean.

So, I guess my prayer this morning is this: that God would grant me the wisdom to carve out a little more time each day for playing the guitar or violin, writing, reading the Bible, spending a little more time with my wife and kids and Him.

Maybe I could then sleep a little better.