To Each Day

What are your daily habits?

Habits can be liberating as much as they can also be imprisoning. Overcoming this insidious trap is in allowing the trained and disciplined mind its flexibility.

Knowing when to vary our habits is a better habit to learn. This is in keeping with the principle that change is the only constant. When you learn how to immediately vary your habits when life calls for it, you have successfully beaten the fear of losing control of your life, mind, or anything important.

Knowing when to return to a fixed habit is equally important. Like any mathematical equation, life needs a constant and a variable. Our habits have constants and variables, and we must familiarize ourselves with the constants in our habits.

These habit constants are important guides to let us know when we are veering off path. Inability to recognize the constants in our habit patterns is how we wake up in situations that we don’t know how we got there.

And then, like popular literature and philosophy has it, it is rare that a person does something just once in their lifetime, especially if there are no sinister consequences to doing it. This information is a bidirectional sword. It helps you understand that other humans have defaults, and it helps you understand that you have a default as well.

Defaults can be defining, debilitatingly destructive, incredibly limiting, or endlessly liberating. You have arrived metacognition when you master this fact.

By all means, have a habit, learn a habit, release a habit, and understand that your habits can quietly be for or against you.