a walk (defamiliarizing my routine)

“Time to take a silly walk for my silly mental health,” Ive said to myself at least once a day since March 2020. Its hard to avoid the boredom of convention as we automate more of our lives. As Henri Bergson puts it, theres “something mechanical encrusted on the living.” In an essay on literary criticism, Viktor Shklovsky argues that as perception becomes habit, it becomes automatic, and to live in a state of automatism is to live a life half-expressed. As we become used to our routines, we stop...