Habits

A couple weeks before going on vacation for the holidays, my husband and I started working on a puzzle.  I was thrilled.  I like puzzles. They stimulate and simultaneously frustrate me, and finding that one piece that fits in that one spot after searching for nearly an hour is what I imagine it feels like to discover gold.  Another great thing about the puzzle?  It was a new evening activity we could do together that didn't involve staring at the TV, which was essentially how we spent most of our evenings. 

Since getting back from vacation and setting back into the everyday routine that poor puzzle has sat on our card table, neglected for weeks.  We talk about going downstairs and working on it, until we realize that it's just easier to stay curled up on the couch and watch another episode of Breaking Bad on Netflix.  Every morning as I hurry out the door to work I walk by the puzzle, the edge pieces and a small section of the top all connected together, and I think how badly I want to connect the rest of the pieces and see the finished product.  But by the time evening rolls around and I swear I can feel a headache approaching because I've been staring at a computer screen for five hours straight, I decide I just need to put on my glasses and dish up some ice cream. 

The point of my story is not that I'm a crappy puzzle put togetherer (yes, I made up that word), my point is that habits are hard to break.  They don't even have to be good or bad habits, just habits in general.  Habits of your general routine become so ingrained that the simple act of spending the evening in a different room of your house sometimes seems too foreign to contemplate.  

Everyday routine, the habits we develop because we just get used to doing things a certain way, at a certain time, at a certain place, these are the ones that can be tough for us to recognize and also tough to amend.  My first year after college was very odd to me, because when I got home in the evenings I didn't have papers to write or chapters to read.  I didn't have, well, anything to do that needed to be done, and that just wasn't what I was used to.  

I know for me it's extremely hard to break these everyday routines.  This is why I have such a hard time writing in the evenings, as silly as that sounds.  My evenings are generally spent cooking, eating, talking with Dean, watching TV, and usually reading and snuggling with my dogs.  It is actually hard for me to go downstairs, sit at my computer, and type.  Even when I feel like writing, when I have words that need to get on paper, this is still hard for me to do.  Doesn't that make absolutely no sense??  At first I attributed this phenomenon to laziness, but I think there's more to it than that because I can see this pattern in other aspects of my life, in my day-to-day routine that show me it isn't just writing in the evenings where I notice this aversion. 

Sometimes I get too caught up in looking at the big picture that I miss the small details.  These everyday habits go by unnoticed because, well, we go through them everyday and before long they are just "the way things are."  Which is why my puzzle sits on that card table and the computer in my office hasn't been turned on in weeks.  Trying to break with what is normal, expected, and comfortable can be hard, even if the "break" is something we really want to do.

I'm always classifying my habits as either good or bad, never giving much thought to everything that falls in the middle.  Maybe it's time to readjust my view.