Creatures of Habit

Each morning, as dawn comes, the birds in my suburban neighborhood begin their calls back and forth, re-establishing contact with others of their species.  Each morning, once it is fully daylight, the squirrels begin their intricate descent to the deck in my backyard, where they will search for breakfast in the leaves or nearby grass.  All those animals have their morning habits, just as I do with my routine of coffee, radio, and reading.  All of our seemingly mechanical behavior is prompted by something even more regular -- the clock-like rising of the sun.  Therein lies a story of the universe, with its complex mixture of order and the unexpected.

Our contemporary U.S. culture, in which new products and discoveries are continually publicized, tends to elevate change.  We are frequently exhorted not to get stuck in a rut. When I was growing up, I often heard people say that we should not be "creatures of habit." The very use of the word "creatures" in that label (rather than saying "people") underscored that habits were something mindless -- something we humans should rise above.  (No one noticed the irony that people were habitually exhorting others not to be creatures of habit.)

The 20th-century Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, a master of tragicomedy, said through one of his characters that "Habit is a great deadener."

Despite habits so often being considered something that we should break, no society could long exist without them.  That insight was made by the late 19th-century psychologist William James, who wrote:

"Habit is... the enormous fly-wheel of society, 

its most precious conservative agent.... 

 It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life 

from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. 

It keeps the fisherman 

and the deck-hand 

at sea through the winter."

The morning routines of the birds, squirrels, and myself were all triggered by the "habitual" rising of the sun. With the rise of Newtonian science in the 17th century, scientists tended to say that bodies such as our sun obeyed "natural laws" with their mathematical regularity. Today, scientists still search for underlying regularities in the world, but much less often use the phrase "laws," which was clearly a term borrowed from human society. We even know that the apparent movement of the old sun through our sky, which once seemed absolutely mechanical in its seeming clock-like movement , is not absolute, because the Earth's rotation is gradually slowing over time. Thus it is that even the sun in our sky cannot be absolutely unchanging in its habits.  It even has unpredictable flares in the fires on its surface.  Even the sun is a complex mixture of order and the unexpected.

We live in a world of both underlying order and underlying novelty.  And, I bet even those birds and squirrels -- with all their alertness along with their regularity -- would also make adjustments in their behavior if something new and potentially significant entered the routine of their day.

~~~

Do you have a routine, intentional or not, that adds something valuable to your life?

(The Beckett quote is from Waiting for Godot, III. © 1952, trans. 1954.)

(The James quote is taken from Psychology, Briefer Course, by William James, © 1892.  p. 143.)

(Both the photo and the illustration are in the public domain because their copyrights have expired.)