The Antithesis of Habit…

Every morning, I wake up prior to the alarm going off beside my bed.  Usually, the television has already turned on by itself, a timer I set the night before.  My wife is sleeping beside me.  She likely has had a horrible night’s sleep.  I watch the news for maybe a half an hour.  I fight having to get up.  I dread having to do those things we do every morning, brush our teeth, take a shower, so on.  Its not that I dislike being clean.  Far from it, there’s nothing like taking a shower or a bath and getting cleaned up.  I think it is the routine, the habit, that I hate.

I have never really been a military kind of guy, mostly because I hate the idea of having to lose my identity to the habit that the military beats into you.  Military men are creatures of habit.  When I was in law school, I became friends with another student who was a military man.  The habitual way he did everything showed in every thing he did.  He opened doors in a certain way, in particular when females were around.  The way he ate was habitual, the way he said a small prayer before he ate.  I think to a certain extent it was this habit that eventually caused a rift grow between us.

I am certainly not a creature of habit.  I like the spontaneity of things, letting things happen as they come.  I do not like having being places at a certain time.  I do not like having to wear certain clothing for certain occasions.  I like to be able to wear what I like when I like.  In a word, I like to be comfortable.  This usually means a pair of baggy jeans, a T-shirt, and a pair of sneakers.  I like the way the clothes are easy to slip on and off, the way  that when you take these types of clothes off, you do not have to fold them or hand them up to wear them again. 

Suits you have to hang.  Button up shirts you have to hang up.  Nice shoes must be carefully removed and perhaps be filled with shoe horns.  This habit eats up time, time spent doing other things. 

The antithesis of habit is laziness.  I hate to brush my teeth or hang up my clothes because I am lazy.  There is no positive or negative aspects to these activities except that they eat up time spent in more pleasurable ways.  I struggle with habit.  It is something I practice forcing myself to do the simple things everyday that are habitual so that when it comes to the larger, more important things, I do not waver in my attention to them.

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