Highly Helpful Habits (Or Not)

We live in a world of structures – offices, homes, and buildings of many types. Structures provide shelter and comfort. But they can be a trap.  When I met my second wife Susan she had been living for eleven years in a house she disliked.

“We thought we would just live there for a year, then sell it and buy the slightly more expensive house we really wanted,” she said.

There are other structures that invade and pervade our lives – the habits which are imprinted on us through repetition.

A habit is first a cobweb, then a cord, finally a cable. This is why, in forming habits, we should be careful.  Soon enough our habits will become a boundary beyond which we will seldom travel.

During the past few months I’ve shared many meals with my friend Jim.  While I like to try new foods, Jim was very clear at our recent lunch.

“I will never eat anything that I haven’t eaten before,” he said.  “I never try anything new.”  Jim eats sparingly.  He also works out for more than two hours a day.

I guess I’m never going to feel the endorphin rush that Jim must enjoy, because I’ve never exercised every day, or lately even every week.  I know I should exercise but Jim is defined by his habits and I by mine.

Recently, however, I have, to my surprise and delight, changed my long standing eating habit.

For more than seventy years I have lived to eat.  Before breakfast I started thinking about lunch.  During lunch I salivated over dinner.  At dinner, well, I often ate so much that I couldn’t consider ever eating again.  Until about eleven pm.

Now I eat to live.  I stopped following my parents’ admonition to “finish everything on your plate.”  I now eat until I’m full, or almost full.  I leave food on my plate – especially at restaurants.  Sorry, Dad, I know I’m wasting money.  Sorry, Mom, I know I’m abandoning all those starving children in (fill in the country). Of course, as I remember it, the food left on my plate never fed a single starving child.  It always went either to the dog or down the garbage disposal.

I’m also beginning to organize my life in another constructive way.  Years ago when I left for a two-week vacation I hid my car keys in the closet.  When I returned I couldn’t find them and had to change a lot of locks.  (I found my keys two years later, on the shelf of my bedroom closet, just above eye level.)

I’m now working on organizing my hearing aids. Before going to sleep I used to leave one in the bathroom and the other on the nightstand next to my bed.  Or somewhere else.  But as I rushed to leave my house in the morning I found myself scrambling to find “the other one.”  (Whenever I misplace something I always find it in the last place I look.  If I find it at all.)

Now I’m leaving both hearing aids in the same little saucer on my nightstand every night.  I’ll have to create some other kind of excitement in the morning.

One of my habits for the past five years is to post this blog every Tuesday morning.  That means I have to finish writing and editing by late Monday.  My habit is to always meet a deadline, but I seldom finish any task early.

But this blog is finished.  I’ll write about meeting deadlines another time.

Alan