Repetition

Repetition:

1 a: the act or an instance of repeating or being repeated b: a motion or exercise (as a push-up) that is repeated and usually counted2: mention , recital

[Merriam-Webster]

Even definition of repetition sounds repetetive.
Repeat, reiterate, rurun, replicate, duplicate, … These are supposed to be synonyms, but all of them have a different meaning. They fail to repeat the true meaning of repetition.

I wonder how it is that repetition plays such a large role in the lives of humans. We get up, we eat, or do we brush our teeth first? (Brush before or after eating? It’s like a watered down version of whether the chicken came before the egg.) Day after day after day, we go to work, or perhaps we sit down at our computers and surf, or maybe we go to school. Whatever we do, odds are we repeat it most of the time.
Don’t we get bored of it? Yes. But that doesn’t seem to stop us from repeating it anyway. Maybe it’s in our genes, in our DNA: GATC, over and over again - in different patterns, but all the same nevertheless.

The best games, movies, and books are such that we pick them up and re-read them, re-experience them, repeat them. Why? Do the words change? In the case of games, yes, they might. But books? Movies? Watch them enough and you can quote them by heart, repeat them to yourself. Because they don’t change although your perception might.

Repetition forms a pattern, and patterns can be pleasing to the eye.
How is it that the artwork of Andy Warhol can be so successful? They appear to be nothing but the same screenprinted image, over and over again, with not so subtle differences in coloring. We have music, which is based on repetition. The same drum-beat, repeated lyrics, and if in fact the music becomes some sort of crazed eclectic disjointed non-repetetive thing, it’s unpleasant for the ear.

Habits, repeated. Shaking of hands, kissing on cheeks.
Subtle changes can cause huge differences. I read that if you cannot sleep, the cure for insomnia is to change your routine into something else, and then continue to repeat that. For example, read a book before you go to sleep. Or perhaps go for a walk. And then do this each time before bedtime and eventually you will “reprogram” yourself with a different repeated habit and regain the ability to sleep.

Crafts such as knitting - nothing but repetition. Make a loop, poke another loop through it, drop the first loop, repeat. Weaving: over, under, over, under, over, under…

Life. You are born, you die. It’s the same story for us all, assuming we were born alive.

How is it that with so many constant repetitions we continue to soldier on through it? Why doesn’t it become overwhelming to know that for the rest of your life, you will continue to wake up and go to sleep, shit and eat, and then, like so many others before you, repeat the age-old pattern of dying?

I feel like a robot already just from waking up and going to work every day and performing similar tasks every day. Open file, crop, save, close, open file, crop, save, close…
But at least I vary my meals and try to find new and better ways of performing my tasks.

My grandmother has become a complete robot. Nothing is left to chance. She eats the same food every day. By that, I mean she eats the same exact brand of the same exact item in the same exact combinations. I have never seen so many exactly the same empty jars of jam stuffed into the same cardboard box. Not even the toiletpaper must be varied - it must be the same brand. The same milk, because this is the one that fits into the fridge, nevermind if there are others that do so too. Watch the same tv programs, the same time of the week…
I think the only variation is when she falls over and can’t get up, but even that is repeated often enough to be a routine.

It’s odd how repeating the same days over and over again can have different effects on how I perceive time. In school, for example exams had a way of pouncing on you before you even saw them coming. Other times, like now, it seems life crawls at a snail pace. I’ve been here under two weeks, and it feels as though I’ve been here at least a month, or perhaps I never left in the first place. So the nine months I shall be here will feel like four months, unless something changes.

Sigh. I bet I’ve even written this post before, but if I’m lucky, I’ll have used different words.