Nearly five years ago, when I wrote about the closure of my second (and probably final, given the zero usage now) book of accounts, I had ended it with how the days of our lives have found a rhythm, a familiarity. They actually point to the habits that have become a part of my life. Earlier this year, when I wrote The building blocks of freedom, the ending was again a commentary on habits. As I quoted in it (from a splendid post Routine Maintenance), while habits are indeed a way to off-load cognitive overhead… at their most extreme, habits can slide into addictions and compulsions, patterns that resist our conscious efforts to break them… Ritual dissolved into routine.
Habits, as I wrote, are possibly a micro-version of intentionality. They are are physical, mental and even emotional. But when we don’t review them, it is almost as though they hijack our intentions and make them subservient! It’s almost like the new Batman’s point about scars – Our scars can destroy us, even after the physical wounds have healed. But if we survive them, they can transform us. They can give us the power to endure, and the strength to fight. As I have realised many times recently, it is extremely difficult to be objective about my habits. It is only when I am deeply mindful that I observe some of my habits, and sometimes laugh at their absurdity. But when I go back and understand where it came from, I also give a mental hug to my earlier self. 🙂
Very recently, it also made me review my deep-set approach to retirement. I had mentioned that in my previous post – the third point in Uma Shashikant’s excellent article (below).
I always assumed that the day I stopped working for a living, I could switch into a ‘different me’. I now see how it’s quite impossible. I will have to start looking at the ‘difference’ right now, and build new habits and junk old ones that can help me move in the direction of the ‘new’ me. The idea is that it won’t seem new. Turns out this isn’t a problem that only I encountered. In a couple of books and articles that I read recently, I came across some very insightful perspectives.
Familiarity and habit impoverishes the way they look at things. They are mostly unable to break away from the past and see things in a fresh way. It doesn’t help that breaking away might mean losing everything that made them great/admired. Lack of interest and curiosity are aggravated by biological conditions, and this intellectual and emotional indifference may cause inertia.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age
…Marcel wrote of the human tendency to become stuck in habits, received ideas, and a narrow-minded attachment to possessions and familiar scenes. Instead he urged his readers to develop a capacity for remaining “available” to situations as they arise. Similar ideas of disponibilité or availability had been explored by other writers, notably André Gide, but Marcel made it his essential existential imperative. He was aware of how rare and difficult it was. Most people fall into what he calls “crispation”: a tensed, encrusted shape in life — “as though each one of us secreted a kind of shell which gradually hardened and imprisoned him.”
“On the Ontological Mystery,” Gabriel Marcel, via At the Existentialist Café
And while being too lazy to type out the one above, I found someone had already written about ‘crispation’. And found this (below) there. It reminded me of the converging life Amor Towles wrote about.
“We all end up as packaged goods,” Westbrook Pegler remarked a little while before he died. The dreary road to the wrapping and bundling counter is probably inescapable: there is the hunt for the discovery of what works, then the erosion of curiosity about what else might work, then the disappearance of all curiosity about anything unfamiliar, and at last the prison of the safety of one’s own accepted manner. Yeats was a little way off the mark; the peril for the artisan no less than for the artist is not that his circus animals may desert him but that he will let slip past the time when he ought to turn them back to the forest.
via James Mustich
And finally, my favourite story on what habits can do, and where I don’t want to end up. Poignant, hard-hitting, and true.
