a walk (defamiliarizing my routine)

“Time to take a silly walk for my silly mental health,” I’ve said to myself at least once a day since March 2020. It’s hard to avoid the boredom of convention as we automate more of our lives. As Henri Bergson puts it, there’s “something mechanical encrusted on the living.” Viktor Shklovsky argues that as perception becomes habit, it becomes automatic, and to live in a state of automatism is to l…