Mind your habit energy
December 7, 2009 by Ed Conley
Filed under The Practice of Being Happy
The Practice of Being Happy: #8. I had my hand on the broken coffee bean grinder but I didn’t throw it in the dumpster. I could feel the inertia of my habit energy wanting me to throw the broken and what I deemed unfixable thing away. It pulled at my mind like a rip tide. it had its own logic: “She is never going to fix this. Get rid of it!”
My wife had said she wanted to get it fixed but the one we were using now was working fine, my habit logic said.My habit so wanted to throw it away..and yet my hand didn’t move. I could feel awareness penetrating the current like the sun cutting through clouds. Awareness told me that throwing this away was going to hurt my wife. What was more important: her feelings or my sense of rightness, it asked? Did this grinder have any inherent existence in itself? Or was this grinder just another prop for my habit? What was real here? The grinder or the habit…and was the habit real?
Then I shut the pickup gate and drove away with the grinder safely on the way back to our storage barn. My wife may fix it or she may not, or she may forget about it…but that was not the point. What was important was that I had broken the inertia of my habit energy. I had seen into the unreality of my habit and the objects it picks up and carries away.
Habits are blind currents of energy that always get us in trouble, at least my habit of throwing things away does. Being clean and having an orderly space is important, but one’s order must be conscious and aware of the order and needs of others, and blind habits are never conscious. They are our autopilots, and while they have their purpose, one must stay awake or you will fly right by your home airport.
For today’s practice find your habit energies or patterns. Notice what you do automatically: it might be a reaction or a thinking pattern, it might be some behavior that you are programmed to do, or it might be a comfortable routine, or an uncomfortable routine like cursing at drivers that don’t behave the way they should. Notice the consequences of your habits. Map out the pattern of your habit. Do they help or hurt those you live with. Our lives are full of habits, deep ones and superficial ones, and we need to notice them. Put signs up like you do at the beach when a ripe tide is active. DANGER, HABIT IN PROCESS. BE AWARE!
Ed,
As I was reading this I remembered a visit to the small house you originally lived in, and my asking Tilly how she kept such a small space usful for all of you without tripping, and she said it was your clean habits from the Navy that made you a better husband than most in the matter of keeping clutter from accumulating.
A habit that continues to elude me in approaching old age is that of always putting things back where they belong after using them.
My favorite game is with my hand. (Don’t get the wrong idea). My hand will put my car keys down so it can do something else and neglect to tell my mind where it put them. Then on the way to the car I realize I don’t have my keys.It’s like some strange hand came in and took them out of my pocket…Now the frantic search, and all the time my hand has this little smile hidden in its palm, fingers closed slightly so the mind won’t notice. When the mind finally gives up and relaxes it stressful search, the hand, feeling sorry for its prank, sends a message up the the mind: “Look in the bathroom.”
As the mind now returns to its planned schedule, the hand says to itself, “Maybe someday he’ll pay attention to me. Would it be so much trouble just to listen to the body…to be aware that I exist?”