One gets up, has breakfast, goes about one’s tasks throughout the day — paid or unpaid — then goes to bed to get up and do it all over again.
But within that so-called simple life, are a million decisions which impact on further decisions.
Some of them easy, some of them hard.
But many decisions are bounded by rules. To drive on the left hand side of the road. To pay some legal tender for goods and services. To never criticise Hillary Barry.
Why do we have rules?
Because if you do not have them, people will just act in self interest. Chaos will quickly reign.
Just think of the leaky homes issue in Auckland — cowboy builders and developers, looking to make a quick buck, knocking up houses made of material less durable than the Gingerbread Man.
The finance company collapses after 2008 — shonky finance men dealing in money they neither had nor could afford.
Regulation had to come in to stop this madness.
Sport is part of life so there have to be rules.
Rugby is a complicated sport, so has to have plenty of rules — they are actually laws but seem to be known as rules. There are 30 people running around the field at a decent pace and trying to the best of their ability to get an advantage for their side.
All Black coach Steve Hansen has been talking about the rule book and says there are too many rules and the rule book needs to be simplified.
He has plenty of supporters in that thinking. But like life, culling a whole lot of rules is not going to lead to instant success and gratification for all.
Hansen says the rules do not correspond to what is happening out on the field. That is true in many cases.
The biggest issue for rugby, which sets it aside from most other contact sports, is it is a constant contest for possession.
In sports such as rugby league, gridiron and — more and more so — football, there is no contest for possession. Once a player is tackled, the game restarts.
Football, with its ever-increasing diving and falling over of players, is fast becoming a non-tackling sport — on the ground anyway.
But the contest for possession in rugby makes it difficult to adjudicate and open to interpretation. By trying to make it less open to interpretation, more rules are introduced.
That is why we have a bunch of rules concerning the breakdown.
We always will. Sure, it is confusing and head-scratching but that is the way it is.
Plus one has to be careful what one hopes for. In 2008, the experimental law variations — the poorly named ELVs — were introduced and although most of them were well received, the breakdown was still a mess.
Teams found they were better off without the ball and forwards just spread across the park. Some games had more than 100 kicks in general play.
It was the same in the national provincial competition last year with new trial breakdown laws.
The breakdown would be formed when an attacker supported the ball carrier. So no defender ever committed to the breakdown. Fly-kicking the ball from the breakdown became the norm. There was no contest for the ball in the breakdown.
The rules were dumped with haste.
That is the thing about sport at the highest level. Come up with a new way to adjudicate the game and often it goes the other way.
Coaches, by nature, find loopholes, and ways to get around the new laws. The outcome hoped for from these new laws often leads to the opposite result.
So how does one block those loopholes?
Well, with more rules, of course.
