All Existence is Repetition
by Paul Theroux
from "Under the Wave at Waimea"
All existence is repetition, as regular as the rise and fall of breathing, the tick-tock of waking and sleeping, enclosing the back-and-forth of daily life, the shuttling to work, to home, the rituals at weekends of shopping and cooking, each day, each week an apparent humdrum repeat of the last, especially muffled and unmemorable on this island of brilliant sunshine. Years of this. It is , this existence, a peculiar buoyancy, undisturbed, an economy of effort in a slow spin of vitality – life as rotation.
You might hope for more – for difference, for change, for harmless drama – but you learn that an unchanged life is reassuring, that sameness and placid monotony are safe.