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By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
MARCH 29, 2024 | It’s not all bad that we are all creatures of habit. If nothing else, habits are comforting. You feel at home with some of your habits, relaxed and calm. You don’t feel threatened by them. They also give you a certain stability, guiding your life.
And all of us have habits, even some we don’t recognize.
But how often when you go to regular activities, do you find yourself sitting in the same area? We first recognized this at church, where you will most likely see your other regular attendees parking themselves in about the same place each time they attend. And should you attend another church as a visitor, you somehow gravitate to about the same location among the pews in that church.
Or you attend a Gwinnett Stripers game occasionally at Coolray Field. Don’t you sit in about the same area each time?
There’s nothing wrong with that. As stated above, it makes you comfortable.
The great scholars have written of habits. Gandhi elaborated:
“Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.”
One of the most respected men of our country, Warren Buffett, cultivated habits that the rest of us should practice. His thoughts: “I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it because I like this kind of life.”
Perhaps all of us should do more simple, quiet thinking. At the least, it won’t hurt us. (Try to do it in a quiet place, not in a car on a crowded highway. Thinking deep thoughts on the road might be dangerous.)
As for me, some of my best ideas come on those mornings when you wake up about 3 a.m., and find you can’t quickly go back to sleep. First thing you know, here you go off into tangents, some of them quite different. And from time to time, you come up with new ideas that you have not had before. Your job then is to remember them (or write them down then) in the morning.
Of course, many of us have less wholesome habits that can threaten our very lives. These are the habits we hope to break, but find it difficult. For some, it’s smoking, or drinking, or eating too much. For others it’s always being late, or acting harshly toward others. Often you are ashamed of these bad habits, but find that they seem to stay with you, no matter what you do. “An over-indulgence of anything, even something as pure as water, can intoxicate,” were the thoughts of modern author Criss Jami.
Working against your bad habits is the best thing you can do, but it is difficult. You just hope you can overcome them. But for most of us, that becomes something we must tackle over and over and over. But you must keep trying. It’s hard, as Samuel Johnson observed, ““The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.”
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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