Up for making (or breaking) a habit or two in 2024? Here’s some inquiry and refinement for you.
Make sure what you’re looking at is a habit, and not a routine, tendency, or addiction. Here are some ways to tell the difference:
Habits are small and not emotional. The other things are. All of them require resource (time, money, energy, support). Resource does not manifest out of thin air because it is January. A new habit might be keeping your forks in a different drawer (or in a jar on the counter if you’re thin on drawers). How long does it take you to move them, and to adapt to the new habit of storing your forks differently?
Probably not overnight, but probably not many many weeks. And also, maybe in three months you’ll randomly, accidentally look in the ‘old fork drawer.’ Ok. Does that mean you’ve lost the habit? Do you feel shame or embarrassment? I hope not.
Habits require awareness. Want to curate the habit of taking off your shoes when you enter your home? Post a little photo of Mr. Rogers by the door for inspiration. Get a new rug or set of house shoes. Lovingly offer yourself grace when you realize that you’ve trompled through many many minutes with your shoes on, take them off, and put them by the door. Chuckle.
Mindlessness might participate in some of the habits you’d like to break, and so the key is becoming aware of them. If you’ve got an app on your phone that pulls you into a trance, and deleting it doesn’t suit you [because it isn’t a habit it’s a routine or a tendency or an addiction], consider rearranging the icons and moving your calculator to where your app in question lives. When you mindlessly reach for your app of choice, you’ll be flummoxed by your newfound love of math. Also, should your awareness highlight that what you’re working with is not a simple, innocuous fork habit, summon your therapist/friend/sponsor.
Habits do not inspire existential crisis.
Habits ebb and flow and shift and adapt because you are not a machine. Hello. Howdy. You are likely to oversleep, get sick, have a schedule change, a late-night cry fest, a missed connection in the airport. This is the thing about living in a dynamic ecosystem of living critters. Mechanical is not the goal. No one is keeping score. It’s a false narrative. Think of the forks. The forks are a habit. If you need an easy win, move them around again. Win at forks.
Count your wins.
Count only wins.
Two weeks ago I lost my car keys for the first time in my adult life.
Maybe the second time?
Once a fellow yoga teacher accidentally took my car keys home after her class, leaving me marooned at the yoga studio and totally out of my gourd, but that feels different from losing them. She picked up my keys and dropped them into her purse (thinking they were hers), got distracted, picked up her own keys, and drove home. After an hour of searching the space, hitching a ride home with students, and riding back at 7am the following morning with the spare, she called me. Mortified.
I have clipped my keys to my purse (inside or outside) ever since.
Ever. Since.
So then, two Mondays before Christmas, I took the dog for a long walk and brought my car keys because I needed to retrieve something afterwards. I was in a mental frenzy, on the phone with a friend, spitting venom for the full thirty minutes. The final (fateful!) five I retrieved the thing from my car, took the dog to the side yard where she (finally!) did her business, came inside, and went about a day of studying and work.
Around 3pm, about to walk the dog again, I decided I’d like to swing by the library to pick up a book that was on hold, and went to get my keys. They were not clipped to my purse. They were not in the pocket of my coat. Or my pants.
Did I throw them out with the dog poo?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Virtual Latte to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.