Room Service, Routines, and Deep Ravines

Pristian is standing at the door of my hotel room with his cleaning cart.  There are two wadded bath towels on my floor, the bedspread is tousled, and the surface of my desk is swallowed up with papers, coffee mugs, crumpled receipts.  There is a banana peel browning on my nightstand next to an empty coke can.

In spite of the mess I’ve made, Pristian smiles at me from over the collar of his starched gray shirt and golden nametag.  I assume he’s smiling at me because I’m sitting, indian style, on the carpet with my laptop.  Most hotel guests probably make use of the desk and chair, but the unsightly heap on my desk has banished me to the floor.

I’m trying to journal about something that happened yesterday, but so far I’ve managed only to type a;dslfjkad;jfdk or some variant of home-row nonsense that I routinely use to springboard a writing project.

Pristian is a good-natured young man from the Philippines.  He has an endearing gap between his two front teeth, and he always smiles as he goes about his work cleaning up my messes.  He is efficient in his routine.

“It’s okay for me to clean your room.”  This is not meant to be declarative.  It’s a question, but Pristian forms his questions with declarative syntax and can’t quite get the hang of bringing up the inflection at the end of the sentence to indicate a question mark.

“Yes, please come in,” I say from my cross-legged station on the carpet.

He pulls his cleaning station behind him and bows in the doorway to begin his customary cleaning routine.  He rips off my sheets and puts down starchy clean ones. He replaces my full trash bags with empty ones.  He swaps my empty shampoo bottle with a new one, and exchanges my wadded towels for saintly white ones.  I note that he does this in the same order every day.

“I can vacuum where you are sitting,” Pristian asks - again without the proper syntax or inflexion.  The spot on the carpet that I’ve chosen as my workstation is where Pristian vacuums after he replaces the dirty towels.  I’m familiar with his routine.

I nod yes and pick up my laptop to sit it atop a pile of papers on my desk.   

Pristian looks at my laptop.  “You are doing work.”  He’s interested in what I am typing.

“Oh, just writing my journal.”  Pristian snakes his head around to look at my computer screen.  He flashes his gap-toothed grin when he sees my home-row drivel.  He’s not a native English speaker, but he knows enough to know that ad;lkasdkj can hardly be heralded as journaling. 

I’ve learned a few things about Pristian during my stay here.  For one, he speaks descent English save his inability to properly construct a question.  He likes working here, because this hotel does business in English, and he wants to go to America to manage a five star hotel someday.  This job is good English practice and good hotel management training.  He attends university in Abu Dhabi.

Still amused by my journal entry, Pristian starts up his vacuum, WWwwwHHhhhhrrrrrrr…..and for a moment I just marvel at how similar his vacuuming path is to the vacuuming path he took yesterday and the day before.  I quickly tire of watching him vacuum, so I step carefully over the chord on my way to the nightstand to pick up my banana peel and coke can. Surely I can spare a moment from my a;dkljasdflkjfj literary masterpiece to help out.

The vacuuming stops and Pristian seems happy that I’ve done my part to help clean and saved him from having to pick up another one of my banana peels.

“I remember that you said you wanted to move to America to work in the hotels.  Where would you like to go work in America, Pristian?” I guess I'm trying to make up for my mess by offering conversation.

“I want to see Grand Canyon!”  He speaks loudly - the way people often do after a noisy vacuum has been turned off.  He clearly misunderstood the intent of my question. Either that or he’s been severely misled about the abundance of five star hotels in the Grand Canyon. “You have been to the Grand Canyon!” he yells at me.

Of course, he is asking me if I’ve been, not telling me. After all, there is no way he could have known that I was just there a few months ago.

I give Pristian a brief synopsis of my family’s recent trip to the Grand Canyon as he wraps up his vacuum hose.  He marks something on his clipboard, and backs out of my room smiling and bowing with his cleaning cart in tow.  His whole cleaning routine takes less than 10 minutes, and I wonder if his efficiency is a result of his routine, his doing the same thing in the same order every day. Change sheets. Take trash out. Replace Shampoo…

On my recent trip to the Grand Canyon, I stood at the precipice of the chasm and marveled at the Colorado River miles below.  Eons ago, there was no canyon there.  The land was flat - uncut.  But that was before the water had a routine.  Before it began flowing systematically.  Before its route was regimented.  

At some point the water began to adhere to one path instead of meandering about.  And it flowed over that path every day.  First the routine flow washed away the topsoil.  Then it swept away the thin layer of rock below the topsoil.  Then the sandstone below that.  Then into the bedrock and so on until the water grooved out a ravine, and had no choice but to flow in the channel that the routine had cut away. The water was no longer free to meander.  The routine had chiseled out a path that the water was now confined to. 

And I wonder how much we humans are that way.  We create little harmless routines for ourselves, and before long, we’ve cut away a path, and it becomes the easiest means of travel, so we continue to take the same path over and over again.   Eventually, we cut away layers and layers until we are actually trapped in routines, rivers cutting away at the bedrock and trapping ourselves into a channel.  Change Sheets.  Take trash.  Replace shampoo.  Repeat…

And yet, even if the routine traps us, it simultaneously allows us to be productive, or at least make an impact.  The Grand Canyon is among the most spectacular landscapes in the world, and it is the direct result of the water’s thoughtless adherence to a routine.  Pristian can make a hotel room sparkle in minutes because of his loyalty to routine. 

Everything I’ve ever accomplished was the result of a regimented routine – a study routine, a workout routine, a practice routine. All of my accomplishments were preceded by routines. 

And still I hate the idea of grooving my routine so deeply into the bedrock that I end up like the Colorado River - trapped deeply in an abyss from which I cannot escape.

I think of a specific friend back home who told me she could never move to another country even though she hates her life where she is.  Here is the problem with regiments, with routines.  She is too attached to her not-so-grand canyon to meander outside of the banks that she's been cutting away at for so many years.  Her routine has thoroughly nestled her at the bottom of her canyon, so that she will forever miss out on all of the freshness that life can bring about when one meanders outside of the banks.  When the routine is broken.

All of this contemplation has me inspired to write again, so I seize my computer from atop my desk and sit back down on the freshly vacuumed carpet to get these ideas in writing. But not before I impulsively execute my prewriting routine again…aadlkjfjkda;dfjk;.