Minor Threats - The Value of Pattern and Habit
Pattern. Pace. Dignity and expression.
The value of maintaining a pattern of life cannot be exaggerated. In examining the daily approaches of great artists, thinkers and writers, Mason Curry’s Daily Rituals is an illuminating exploration of how these great men and women spent their days. It explores the time they’d rise, rest, apply their craft and take in the world around them. It explores a myriad of addictions and applications of alcohol, barbiturates, coffee and cigarettes often used to feel as though you’re staying afloat, whilst perhaps truly, slowly drowning. It’s a fascinating read, but points to a powerful insight about pattern and habit that we can learn, adopt and benefit from - especially as lives become even busier in the midst of true love, marriage and caring for a growing family.
Simplicity
Having a daily routine or a pattern of life, allows us to cut down on the need to wonder, consider, weigh up and decide on how and when we’re going to do things. You shouldn’t need to make daily decisions about whether or not you’ll hit the gym, or walk the dog, pray or meditate. Having a routine that is decided ahead of time allows you to avoid decision fatigue, which is detailed nicely on a post over at Tim Ferriss’ blog. Having to make these kinds of decisions day after day doesn’t do you any favours, and in fact, works against you actually having the cognitive energy to choose well and maintain healthy habits.
Take the decisions out of the equation by deciding ahead of time. The hard part isn’t the workout itself. When we get there, we tend to love it. The hard part is making the cognitive leap to overcome your reservation, reluctance and rationalising. Same thing with early starts. The hard part is leaving the warm embrace of a beloved bed (or spouse, no less). Take the decision out of the equation. Set the alarm and keep it far from the bed so you need to get out to shut it off.
Momentum
A beautiful side effect of pattern and routine is the sense of momentum one gets when you’ve been able to ingrain a habit or practice. Even simple things like taking a walk or picking up your camera feel different when they’re consolidated with the joy of consistency and familiarity. All cliches aside, the first steps are often the hardest, but the sense of accomplishment, or the simple joy experienced by the practices and disciplines you’ve worked at, is hard to shake off. It’s far easier to ride your bike to the station instead of driving when you still remember the buzz you felt from yesterday’s ride.
We often neglect and forget the pleasures of the wind biting at our cheek, the joy of our work on the page, or the weight of the bar on our back. Each and every one of these is anodyne unto itself - but we lose the tangible memory once too much time has passed. You go back to the canvas whilst your hands are still stained. You lose that - you start again. And again. And again.
Resilience and Minor Threats
The pattern and routines we adopt can have a third benefit that is the crux of this piece: That is the attitude, identity and resilience that these routines can give us. It is impossible not to be shaped and forged by the pattern of life that we adopt - either consciously or unconsciously. It is not always intent that separates the sloth from the successful - It can simply be the culmination of time and habit. Nobody sets out to be an alcoholic, or morbidly obese, or a pack a day smoker. But it happens, day by day, moment by moment. Thus, you need to develop your habits, develop your craft consciously, day by day, bit by bit, to become the person that you intend to be.
Thus, when the setback happens: you pick up the cigarette after three months without smoking, or you don’t get to the sketchbook or the kettle bells - it becomes a minor blip in a broader pattern and identity of success. You can continue confidently in the knowledge that today’s setback is nothing but a minor threat, easily forgotten in the wake of tomorrows success. This resilience, this productivity and flow, cannot take place in a context of innumerable excuses, failures and missteps. The pattern, the habit, the craft, becomes who you are, to the point where the interruption feels like an aberration.
You should not settle for comfort and familiarity in abandoned intentions and a creative malaise.
Own it
It doesn’t make a single difference whether mean to or not: you are being remade, day after day, by the pattern of life that you live by. If these circumstances and situations feel imposed or unintended, take some sense of ownership and agency and work within the confines and conditions that are placed before you. Teresa of Avila famously wrote that ‘prayer and comfortable living are incompatible.’ In a more modern example, Jack White is an exemplary example of what he refers to as “the liberation of limiting yourself.” We must take the opportunity to live, breathe, craft in create in whatever scant moments, with whatever materials lay before us. Charles Bukowsi, as famous for the frank and passionate ardour of his writing as he was for his alcoholic excess, spat out the simple truth of it in his piece, Air and Light and Time an Space, recently celebrated over at Brain Pickings:
Baby, air and light and time and space
have nothing to do with it
And don’t create anything
Except maybe a longer life to find
New excuses
For.
If you have a talent, a fervour, a passion, a vocation itching in your bones, you need to set it free and respect this gift that you’ve been given. It’s never going to be easy, or convenient, but in time we come to understand that it shouldn’t be easy. We are killed by convenience, ease of access and overconsumption. Take pride in the daily struggle to make it work. Offer up the sacrifices you’re making to create a self and a better world around you: through your art, your discipline, your devotion, your design.
Now
Consider your passions. Consider your craft. Make your simple contribution to the act of creation in your works, day after day, that you might look back and discover a body of work that only builds in its presence and its quality. Make the setbacks minor threats. Don’t let the narrative rest upon the notions of failure and abandonment - build the routines and habits that culminate in a practice, an identity that has consciously built itself upon its discipline and its works.
Keep your hands calloused. Keep your arms aching. Keep your shoes dirty. Keep your canvas laden. Keep the pages rolling. Keep the muscle memory of the strings and keys singing at your touch.
Let your children find you, sweating at your squat rack. Let them find you hunched over a first draft. Let them find you and ask what your building with all this wood. Let them ask you why you get up so early. Let them discover why you still draw, why you task yourself with rebuilding an engine. Let them witness for themselves the joys of a creative work, a disciplined movement, a creative act, with a jump rope in your hand instead of a remote control.
Help them to understand that one does not abandon their works, or their disciplines, to become a husband, or a father or because of a job that demands all too much of us. Rather, we need these works and disciplines all the more, to remind us that the glory and the joy of our very existence demands of us works of discipline, application and creation - day after day.
So go. Fight, make, sweat live and breathe.
Don't forget to leave a comment or question below? What do you work to make time for? What works will you leave behind? What greatest challenges do you face in making it all work.
Gaetano Carcarello is a Discalced Carmelite, father of seven, and a teacher. He’s enamoured of music, smitten with silence and in love with the written word.
He creates custom made novel pages based on pivotal moments in people’s lives at Page 83; tweets as @gcarcarello; and blogs about Fatherhood, Fidelity, Culture and Creativity here at Wristwatches and Radios.