In my acting class, we played red light green light.

It seems weird for a bunch of college students to spend about a half hour in class playing a children’s party game, and yet we did anyway. We started out playing cautiously, afraid to take risks, and then we started to fall into a rhythm.

The game is played by one person (“it”) standing with their back to the rest of the people who all stand in a line at the opposite side of the room. “It” calls “red light” or “green light” to tell everyone else when they are allowed to run at them or not. The first person tag “it” becomes “it” in the next round. But whenever “it” calls “red light,” they can turn around and send anyone that moves back to the starting line.

But as we started to fall into this rhythm, patterns emerged. Most people would always start their approach from the same spot and use the same technique over and over. And when they got caught, it was often in the same spots.

More than that, it was almost always the same people that were getting caught. The same exact people were getting called out over and over again while some of the others kept sliding through unnoticed.

But the people that started to win were those that broke the patterns.

A few days later, I was at a hockey game. My school’s team kept getting the puck away from the other team; their defense was very good. And then they would bring it down the rink towards the other team’s goal. Every single time they would get it ¾ of the way down before losing it again.

They did this over and over, at least three or four times. They kept making the same moves, sending the puck down the same sides.

So I said to my friend “See that? That’s a pattern. I bet you as soon as they break that, they’ll score.”

And they did.

It wasn’t an immediate score, they still lost possession of the puck for a little while right after breaking their pattern, but their goal came less than a minute after they’d broken it.

I don’t claim to know anything about sports because I really don’t know a thing about a single one of them, but patterns do exist. And when they do, they get you trapped in a rhythm of just doing things instead of stopping to think about them.

It’s like how if you take the same route to school or to work every day you begin to forget the trip there. But if you switched it up and activated your mind, you would pay much more attention and be much more alert and aware of your surroundings.

Patterns can appear in anything in life, from sports to games to simple things like completing homework assignments. While they can be helpful to establish some normalcy in life, they can also be detrimental.

If you fall into a pattern, you can complete what you normally and always complete, but you cannot achieve anything extraordinary, outside of the realm of what you usually do. You set yourself expectations that you achieve, but never go above or beyond.

Breaking out of patterns is important. Switching things up every now and then helps create a better life.

After all, if you are always reliving the same day over and over again are you really living any other days?