About the title…

It's my hope that the title phrase is meaningful in three senses:

1. It's a common usage. We label as ‘routine’ any of the myriad recurring activities that we can accomplish with little thought. These actions that seem hardly to demand our serious attention are Routine Matters. Their nature the subject matter of the blog.
2. The topic may seem dull, but the issues presented by the study of routine and other recurring action patterns could not be more fundamental for our working life, our friendships and family relations, our approaches to education and research – even our national political economy. In this sense the title urges careful examination of what we often take for granted: Routine [Really] Matters [!].
3. There is also the sense conveyed more precisely by printing the title as ‘Routine’ Matters. How we use the term is tightly bound up with the problems we are having when we try to understand recurring action patterns. We may become able to see more clearly if we can free ourselves from the impoverished image that we carry along when we presume that routine activities are always mundane in content, rigidly invariant in execution, and isolated from thought or feeling.