‘My doctor advised me to get up at the same time each day’: Phil Brown on his love of routine

After some life changing advice from his doctor Phil Brown decided to revamp the way he lived. This is what happened.

I don’t know about you but I find routine very comforting. I love doing the same stuff day in, day out and I don’t get bored at all.

It may be because my younger years were a bit disrupted. As a young boy we moved around a lot following my father’s construction business.

We lived in more than 10 places before we moved to Hong Kong and then at 13, I came back to Australia. I had an often unsettled life in the ensuing years and then, as a young man, I moved around a lot too.

7.15am every morning is porridge time.

But now I have settled into my own rut and I love it. I enjoy living in Brisbane, I like the suburb where I live, I love the routine of going to work and coming home. It all runs like clockwork and there’s something comforting about that.

I used to keep irregular hours and that wreaked havoc on me in a number of ways. Now I get up at 6.45 every morning (one of my doctors advised me to get up at the same time every day), have a cuppa and 30 minutes later eat a bowl of porridge. Sounds exciting?

When my wife gets home we go for a walk and that happens each and every day and we have three routes we take, the same routes week after week. I love routine and regimentation and sometimes think I should have been in the army like my father. He said he was a general … a general nuisance. But my natural insubordination would probably make that untenable.

I was in uniform once as a sea cadet but I was ejected from the unit. But I have a love of routine and military precision in my timetable to be sure. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had this idea that things repeat themselves much like my daily schedule.

Phil Brown. Picture: Ric Frearson

In his famous book Thus Spake Zarathustra he speculated about something called the eternal return, or recurrence, the idea that everything in existence has been recurring an infinite number of times across time and space and will continue to do so.

I think of Nietzsche sometimes on my walks and wonder if anyone else is thinking of him too? Probably not. Of course he was mad as a hatter and using his philosophy as any sort of yardstick may be problematic.