22nd August 2025

Routine can be boringly slow or incredibly hectic. Particularly at holiday time, we recognise how essential it is to step aside from routine from time to time for one’s physical and mental wellbeing. It’s even better if such breaks are part of a pattern throughout the year, designed to give opportunity for refreshment of the soul – a reminder of the One ‘in whom we live and move and have our being’.

My daily breaks can include Radio 4’s ‘Prayer for the Day’ at 5.45 am, if I’m awake; ‘Thought for the Day’ at 7.45 am; the ‘Daily Service’ on Radio 4 Extra at 9.45 am if I’m in; and usually when having breakfast, a recorded favourite radio comedy from my youth to start my day with a laugh. At the day’s end the Shipping Forecast at a quarter-to-one in the morning on Radio 4 helps slow me down, ready for sleep.

Weekly breaks are my ‘day off’ on Mondays; Wednesday afternoon’s Choral Evensong on Radio 3; and of course Sunday worship at Tyndale. Christians continued the Jewish practice of a day off from the week’s routine, but shifted it from the Saturday ‘sabbath’ rest day to Sunday, the day of Christ’s Resurrection.

Monks and nuns have a structured daily programme of prayer and worship to help them. But each of us can also attend to our own wellbeing and wholeness by devising our own way of stepping ‘out of the flow’ of routine and pressure for a while, in order to take stock, reflect, and be refreshed. How do YOU go about it?

David Bell