Day 4 - Habits of Choice

I think I'm entering the territory of new familiarity in this habit-makingness. Four days of a practice isn't really that much, but things are starting to feel familiar in a particular kind of way...the way that says, I can see doing this thing every day for the rest of my life. I find myself looking forward to the day when missing one day feels uncomfortable...that's a habit.

Anyway, I'm starting today with what am I grateful for because I woke up too early and felt uncomfortable for a variety of reasons. I could harp on all the things that were displeasing, but that's not the exercise, is it?

So I'm very grateful for this ability to make habits. It's not the Groundhog Day movie where by force, you have to do the same thing over and over again. I get to choose to make habits. I choose to make certain habits because it's good for me and makes my life better. That's a very very nice thing, and just thinking that feels good. I suppose it's really a combination of two things - 1) having the ability to choose, free will, and 2) being able to make things into habits.

Some people refuse to create good habits, instead allowing chance and external forces dictate the habits they create. They say that they just aren't disciplined enough, or they could never do X, Y or Z. Whatever the obstacle, it always sounds like a self-imposed one, more along the lines of "I don't want to do that." And the reason for not wanting it comes from fear, laziness, a lesser of two evils kind of reasoning. But certainly not for lack of ability to build a habit. Habits are just repeating something enough times that you begin to do the things automatically, nothing more, nothing less. Building habits is a mechanism, a tool, a built-in app that we were pre-programmed with off the factory floor. The wonder and art of building good habits, then, is the deciding to build them in the first place.

Choice. Choosing one thing and sticking to it. You choose something because there is some kind of reward in choosing that thing. Choose chocolate, get chocolate! Choose a hot shower, get a nice warmed up body in return.

What happens when we choose things that are not good for us? When we choose to eat the whole bag of chocolate, instead of stopping at one or two, we are choosing an immediate gratification and forgoing a greater good of healthfulness. We sometimes weigh the two, how great the immediate gratification is versus how great the good of future healthfulness is. That is the problem with long-term good, isn't it? It's in the future, and we have poorer tools for really knowing the future. All we have are past experiences and other people's strong and frequent admonitions. "Last night I ate a bag of chocolates, and the rest of the night, not only was I awake and restless, my stomach felt horrible." "Eat that much chocolate and you will be fat and pimply and die an early and painful death!"

You have to make mistakes. Otherwise, you can't plan well for the future. And then, you have to keep making mistakes, otherwise, you would get bored, you would never learn anything new, and you might as well be in the Groundhog Day movie. Ideally, we learn how to make smaller mistakes...but sometimes that really just means we learn less, too.

This leads me back to brain biology. I think of the formation of habits, and really, informative life experience, as making trails inside your brain, neural network trails. You run a path over and over and over again with a particular experience, and you solidify a groove in your neural network. What is exciting is once you've solidified a groove, you can begin to riff on that groove, and improvise. That's fun. Sometimes, you make a mistake in your improvisation, and it's like you've stubbed your brain toe on an obstacle, making you veer off in a different direction. The critical thing about making mistakes then, is that you find new ways of doing something, but you don't necessarily throw the habit out with the bathwater, so to speak. Somehow, the tension between a habit and new ways of doing things is either a great stimulator or a great demotivator.

There is something about us that enjoys making more things or experiences, complicating things, improvising, creating new, variety, the web of branches, not just a single straight stem. To carry the theme further, it seems important to have the structure of things we have made into habits in order to support the variety. An improvisation always starts on a basic structure, the original theme. It's the imprinting of that theme into our heads that makes the improvisation interesting and exciting, one could argue. Random improvisations don't make a lot of sense, although they can sometimes have moments of great interest.

Well, this random improvisation has gone on long enough. Time for my five minutes of exercise.

The secret of five minutes of exercise, is that you only have to do five minutes, but invariably, I seem to do about 10-20. Today's exercising was about 10, and my minute of jogging in place and minute of jumping jacks was more than a minute each, and I feel better after them than I did yesterday. It's really nice to feel toasty after exercising.