I Cannot Bear Doing The Same Thing Twice

You can do anything twice. The third time is where it goes.

Something in you closes. Not boredom exactly, which is too mild a word. It is closer to a small revolt, and it arrives on the third occasion of anything, and you have known about it since school.

And it has been the shape of your whole life, and much of that has been good. You have four skills that people who repeat things have never acquired. You notice what everybody else has stopped seeing. You are the person a household needs when something has gone stale.

And you have never once kept a routine, in forty one years, and everything on this site is about keeping one.

So you have read six of these and agreed with all of them and the seventh is where you were always going to stop, because the seventh is the one about doing the same thing every week, and you already know what happens to you.

Let me say what I am not going to do.

I am not going to try to make you like repetition. That is a real thing about how you are made, and forty one years of it is not going to be argued away by an article, and anybody who tried would be treating a temperament as a fault.

What I am going to do is show you that the dullness is allowed to be there, and that it does not have any authority over what you do.

Line upon line, here a little, and there a little

There is a phrase in Isaiah about how instruction actually lands, and it is almost comically repetitive on purpose.

For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little. (Isaiah 28:10, King James Version)

For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, and there a little.

Read how that sentence is built. It says the same thing four times, in the same shape, and the shape is the content.

You have a verse where the repetition is the method rather than a stylistic accident, and Isaiah 28:10 has never once suggested that the same thing said again is a wasted saying. The line goes upon the line, and the Holy Spirit is the one who builds something by putting the same thing down again.

You are able to feel your own resistance to that verse as you read it, which is useful information rather than a problem.

And here is the thing that is worth noticing about it: nowhere does the passage say that the person receiving it enjoys the repetition. There is nothing in it about the experience of the one being taught.

It is a description of how a thing is built. Precept on precept. Line on line. Here a little and there a little, which is to say in small quantities, over a long time, in the same way.

That is a statement about construction and not a statement about pleasure, and those two have got tangled together in you, and untangling them is the whole of this article.

You are able to build something by a method you do not enjoy, and Isaiah 28:10 has never once made the enjoying of it part of the instruction. The Spirit of God is the one who puts line upon line in a person, and the verse describes the method without one word about how it feels.

The dullness is real and it has no authority

Here is the distinction, and it turns out to apply in about nine other areas of a life.

The dullness will arrive. It is real. It is not a sin and it is not a failure. And it does not get a vote.

You have a feeling that has been making your decisions for forty one years, and Isaiah 28:10 has never once put the deciding in the hands of how a thing feels on the third occasion. It is written line upon line, here a little, and there a little, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps somebody going through a feeling that has always been in charge before.

Notice how it has worked so far. The dullness arrives, and you experience it as information. It feels like a signal that the thing has run its course, or that it was not right for you, or that there is something better.

And it is not information about the thing. It is information about you on a third occasion, which is exactly the same information it was the last four hundred times.

So the practice is: let it arrive, name it silently, and do not act on it.

That is all. Not resist it, not argue with it, not pray it away. Let it sit there being dull while your feet do what they were going to do anyway.

You are able to feel the whole of it and go anyway, and going while bored has never once been a lesser act than going while enthusiastic. The Spirit of God is the one who builds line upon line in somebody who finds the lines tedious, and Isaiah 28:10 says nothing at all about the mood of the person receiving them.

The third time, on purpose

So here is the assignment, and it is aimed directly at the place where it breaks.

Do the same ten minutes for the third time this week and let the dullness be there without acting on it.

You are able to arrive at the third time and go through it, and the third time has never once been the place where a thing was supposed to end. It is written here a little, and there a little, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is out on a familiar lane with a woman who is entirely unexcited about it.

The same. Same lane, same person, same ten minutes. Do not vary the route, which is what you will want to do at about minute three of the third one, and which would be a completely reasonable idea and would end this the way it has ended everything.

Take somebody, and this matters more for you than for most people on this site. A companion is the only thing that reliably makes a third occasion different from a second one, because the conversation is new even when the route is not.

And expect the dullness on the third one and greet it. There is something almost friendly about a feeling that arrives exactly when it was predicted.

Then the fourth one is easier, which will surprise you, because you have never been past a third.

You have never once been past the third occasion of anything, and forty one years of that has never once meant you were unable to. Isaiah 28:10 builds by laying the same thing down again, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in the fourth and the fifth and the ninth.