When to break the rules
Image by Judith Shidlowsky from Pixabay
Last weekend we celebrated midsummer at my parents and all the relatives. Our boys put big smiles on everybody’s face, but especially my grandmother, who now has great grandmother on her CV. She also celebrated her 90th birthday on Saturday which coincide with Midsummer, which is a big Swedish holiday, so we had a nice celebration. When the dinner was over, and it was bedtime for the little boys, 3-year-old Elis was nowhere to be found. We looked and finally we found him with great grandma, who had already gone to bed. She was watching TV and Elis had cozied up in the double bed sofa next to her. And when I told him it was time to go to bed he just said. No dad, I am sleeping in THIS bed and watch TV. Great grandma had zero objections. We don’t see each other that often because we live in different cities. I noticed the biggest smile I had ever seen, literally, on great grandma’s face, when she finally had the opportunity to just be together with him. This was clearly one of those occasions when rules had to be broken. I just laughed and said, OK, you sleep here that’s perfectly fine. I also noted that Elis eyes were very tired, and minutes later he was snoring. It was the best 90th birthday present ever.
I think this very cute little story is the best example I have ever come across where it is necessary to just forget about the rules and the routines. Personally, I am extremely rules-based when I have established a routine. For example, practicing a musical instrument for 15 minutes every single day since 2014 (except when I am travelling). But in the midsummer story, there was no doubt that the normal bedtime rules had to be broken. I simply knew it was the morally right thing to do.
Another rule that I just broke is to publish a weekly blog post every Monday, which I have done without deviation 133 times up until today. This 134th post comes on a Tuesday instead. A big house, two kids and two dogs obviously require a lot of upkeep. When we got back home from our little vacation there was already a huge backlog of things to do. Well, huge at least when you are on home alone on parental leave because then even small things require proper micro-management. The biggest problem was to mow the lawn, which had grown extremely long after almost two weeks without care. I had missed last week because of rain, which gave it some more growth energy. So, yesterday when all the crucial dad duties were taken care of with lightning speed, I fired up my tractor and starting mowing for at least two hours in the night. I was determined to not let my lawn continue its growth into chaos. And then, when an extremely productive day (by any measure) had come to an end and I was about to go to bed, I remembered that I had forgot to publish the blog post. In a normal situation, I would just crawl out of bed again, fire up the computer and start writing. But this time, I remembered the lesson from 3-year-old Elis and decided: No. I am going to bed. It is OK to break the rules sometimes, and a hit ratio of 134 to one is still decent.
I do realize that there is a grave danger in my choice here because it takes forever to establish a habit. A habit stops being a habit as soon as you stop doing it. But on the other hand, the risk of this deviation is much smaller than if I would have failed in the first one or two years. In my case, I have a well-established routine. My habit rests on a foundation built of 133 consecutive blog posts, and it will be very easy to return to it next week. Musicians know this very well. When the song and the band is well-rehearsed, it is easy as pie to drift out and improvise and still come back to a common framework. It can also be that something unexpected happens on stage. An experienced band knows that the show must go on, disregard the distractions, and keep playing. A band that hasn’t rehearsed enough, lack the common foundation, and will face difficulties finding their common framework. I look at my missed blog post in the same way and thus, I am not worried. Although, I should probably start thinking about the blogging habit and whether it is something that I should just keep on doing forever?
When to break the rules is an interesting problem from an engineering perspective. Nowadays, machine learning and AI take a larger and larger part of our daily lives. But how do you train a rules-based AI to make moral deviations from the rules?