Monday, December 06, 2010

Bon mot for the week

"Habits are what we develop to avoid the chore of having to make choices all the time."


Froog

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2 comments:

JES said...

Yes, there's that.

Although as I've gotten older, I find too that habits help us avoid the chore of remembering what we need to do. I don't think of my life as dull, but yes, there's a heck of a lot of routine to it -- and actually not as much driven by the day job as I might have once thought.

The Missus sometimes laughs (with me) at my zealous "NOW I must do THIS" habits... right up until the time when I let one of those habits lapse, and we both forget to take our daily prescriptions, or whatever.

One of these days I'll have to write about her and my different approaches to the morning commute. We ride to work together every day, alternating driver-passenger roles, so it's easy to notice the bright and shining line of habit which separates us when we take our respective turns behind the wheel.

December 06, 2010 1:26 PM
Froog said...

One of the things that bothers me most is how unconscious my walking to and from home has become. I so rarely turn right out of the front gate of my apartment building that I now find it physically difficult to do so, I have to concentrate furiously to stop myself turning around and going the other way. There is one particular route (to my favourite bar!) that I follow three or four times a week.... and if I'm not paying attention, I often find my legs carrying me that way unbidden, when I'd been planning to go somewhere slightly different.

One of the things that most bugged me about that first teaching job I wrote of a week ago was that - after a couple of years - the almost nightly walk back from the masters' common room (i.e., bar) to my apartment had quickly become so deeply ingrained in me that I realised I could do it blindfold. In fact, on occasions I pretty much did; my friend and I would often be turning in so late that the caretaker would have swithced off all the lights and locked up all the doors, and we often couldn't be bothered to put the lights on again, even when navigating a long windowless corridor. Particularly with that stretch of corridor along the ground floor of the main school building, I knew exactly where all the steps were, where the light switches were, whether this set of swing doors was 'push' or 'pull'. That excessive degree of familiarity began to become depressing to me - the way I found my hand reaching for a doorknob or a banister rail in pitch blackness and finding it exactly every time.

December 07, 2010 2:55 AM

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