I went searching for the word “habit” in my emails and documents to find some sort of inspiration for this month’s
Symposium. Apparently, I don’t have a habit of using the word habit, tho I wanted to be a nun under the weighted tunic of wool all capped off with a coif to cover my unstylable hair. My original aim was to be a priest, with the power and the Cadillac and Sunday oratory skills. But when I found out about the misogyny of the church, instead of rebelling, I subserviently chose the veil instead; a bride of Christ and all that. But that was long ago when I read the bible to my stuffed animals and didn’t know that Jesus could be bastardized beyond the absence of an earthly father.Back to habits. . . .
I found this post I wrote a year-and-a-half ago that I’d forgotten about. It has some stellar lines that I’m impressed by as if they didn’t come from me at all, so much as a dreamy, open-throated version of who I was on my way to becoming.
Lines like. . .
I Am A Lemon Daughter from A Lemonade Mother.
(Even in the most frightening of times, my mom has lived a life of turning lemons into lemonade, while I’d slow-trudge behind with a scowl and a round belly full of kid resentment. My mom has the playful sugar touch tho, so soon I’d be the Sancho to her Quixotic adventure.)
I still wear Kali’s dresses, missing the way she’d gather me into her arms and against the breasts that took her away.
(I likely won’t come to terms with losing Kali until I forgive myself for Juan’s death. She was the last person who he wished Happy Birthday to on September 30, 2017, only for her to die nearly 3 years to the day after him. They were similar in more ways than just their curls.)
Every field veined by fallen wood is a reminder of the mortality of our Family Tree. The tree we thought would grow forever, spanning fences, fat with fruit, ripe for climbing.
(I wrote this when my mom had just been diagnosed with colon cancer. Nearly 18 months later, she’s cancer-free, in amazing health, and forging a new life as a single woman with female friends and more philanthropically inclined artistic and earthly endeavors than I can count.)
The part about habit came later with this:
When I awoke early and had coffee on the patio, it was the quiet magic of Christmas Eve. So, I decided to start every morning on the patio, peeking over the fence to catch the sun, letting the birds get used to me again. A habit I’ve kept up to this day, a Gunter’s chain of 57 days. A habit I didn’t know Jim noticed until eight inches of snow fell the night before. The next morning, I walked out to a patio deep of snow except for one chair, blown completely clean, ready for me.
Fifty-seven days of going to the patio each morning, no matter the weather, has become 558 days of going to the patio each morning, no matter the weather. But I would no longer call this activity a habit so much as a seamline of decisions. Each movement is an intentional stitch in a morning garment. If it was habitual, I’d find myself on the patio with little to no recall of how I came to be there. Habits aren’t as autonomic as breathing, but they’re automatic as if the action arises before the intention. Little about me is habitual, though lots about me is predictable. I’m unsurprising.
My baddest habit is my thinking. The way I can be going about a day in a state of peace or joy, only to have the concept of Juan appear, less like an apparition and more like a gooey wound.
He is not the Cut; he is the Heart.
I am the Blade.
I am the Bullet.
I am the “I had my phone on Do Not Disturb,” and he likely believed that he was my Disturbance.
But he was my Spirit, the bifold of my Soul.
This reads like a stream of consciousness, but it’s an apt example of my habitual whirlpool thinking, the grief and guilt, the foam and fault; I am the eddy your parents warned you about as you stepped into the river of your independence.
I wouldn’t call this process of thinking a habit if it happened on the weekly, like phone calls to family, or the monthly, like menstruation, but it’s multi-daily. My mind is a clogged colander where the holes are uninvited thoughts, and the blocks are my self-sabotage.
How do you break a habit of automation?
How do you get ahead of the thought?
Can it be swept into submission by a guillotine choke?
Or do I need to learn the skill of rope?
To lasso the stallion that runs rampant and wild, naked in shame, through my brain. Maybe meditation would help. Maybe more yoga. Or maybe some habits become so embedded in us that they are unbreakable and untamable.
Four years ago, while completing a graduate certificate via a remote nutrition program through Tufts University, I wrote a small essay about habits titled, “We’ve Got Heart” Walking Intervention Program Based on the Dual Process Model.
. . . here is a bit of it. . .
This intervention is based on the dual process model which recognizes human behavior is driven as much by automatic decision-making as rational decision-making, and will attempt to align intention (reflective process) with habit (automatic process) to satisfy the outcome measure. This program, which focuses on habit creation rather than habit disruption, is also informed by the Rider and Elephant metaphor proposed by Jonathan Haidt and expanded on by the Heath brothers, wherein the Rider represents rational/reflective processes and the Elephant represents automatic/implicit processes (8, 9).
I am ever the Elephant. Riderless and worn.
Implementation Intentions aid habit formation, and are especially effective when used in conjunction with barrier removal (12). A meta-analytic review of the effect of implementation intentions on PA found them to be low cost, easy to deliver, especially effective when matched with barrier removal strategies, and showed better results with participants in rehabilitation programs than in the general population (12). Program directors will work with the women to develop their own if-then implementation intention statements that also help to remove barriers to PA. Participants will be provided with a list of possible implementation intentions that they can use as their own or for inspiration.
I listed five implementation intention examples specific to the hypothetical “We’ve Got Heart” program. And maybe that is what I need. To transform this habit of blame rather than bust it.
If I . . . .
have a desperate thought about the loss of Juan,
then. . .
I will recall a memory where he made me laugh.
Like when he excitedly turned over his shoulder on the narrow trail atop a snowy ridge where no one but us had been all year and asked, “Do you want to know something interesting about snow?!” I doubled over and called him a nerd with a laugh that crystallized in the air.
If I. . .
have a thought about my guilt and culpability,
then. . .
I will call to mind a time when I showed him love.
Such as when I’d let him envelop my smallness in his largeness because he told me once that to touch is as comforting as to be touched, and we’d lay in silence til the sadness passed.
And
If I. . .
am haunted by answerless questions, such as did you finally find peace on the slope, and was the metal warm or cold,
then. . .
I will call to mind guidance he gave me.
Such as his wise aphorisms, “It’s only as weird as you make it,” or “Sometimes people need to blow off steam; otherwise, they’ll boil over and burn everyone around them,” or his statements of love, like “Our friendship is effortless. Te quiero my dearest friend.”
I guess if you can’t beat a habit, then you join a habit and take its hand to change it.
Thank you for describing so well that inexplicable truth of deep friendship.
How could this be any better? As near to ideal as I can imagine.