Posted on June 4, 2009 - by bj

Habit

Yesterday, as i was leaving band practice, i stumped my toe on my emergency brake pedal while getting into my truck. And man, did it hurt. i ended up having to pull over shortly, because i realized that blood was pouring out the tip of my toe. So as i cleaned my wound, i was trying to think about why this happened. It’s not like we vary up the way that we get into our vehicles…. i wasn’t like, “hey, i’m gonna try and get in my truck this way,” and then BAM, i smack my toe! i get in my truck the same way every time, and well….this was just a freak accident. This eventually got me thinking about habits–the habits that we form and are immersed in on a daily basis. i will probably be all over the place here but hopefully it makes sense. First off, i think good habits are a good thing, but i think habits can also be our enemy–and not just bad habits either. When i think about a “habit,” i think of this broad “thing,” comprised of several other “things.” For example, i’m not married, but i have an idea of what it will be like and i know that it should be a habit for me to love my wife, if i’m blessed with one and the same being said about her. There are also going to be several things that we do to show our love. However the things that we do to carry out that love should probably vary if we want to “keep the fire alive.” If i woke up and said/did the same exact thing to my wife, it would eventually get old although they were in themselves, good things. i just used marriage because it was an easy example, but this translates to basically anything in our lives. Think about your faith. We should practice good habits–community, reading the Word, praying, etc… But, there are some things that we might do habitually that hinder our relationship with the Lord that aren’t necessarily bad things but can end up becoming distractions. i’ll let you ponder that for yourself. Miguel de Unamuno said in his book, Tragic Sense of Life, “The satisfied, the happy, do not live; they fall asleep in habit, near neighbor to annihilation.” If we’re not careful, our habits can lead us into complacency, preventing us from the life that we were meant to live. He also said, “To fall into habit is to begin to cease to be.” Habits can cause us to miss out on a lot so we should be careful. They can become the wall that separates ourselves from the world around us. Just because you’ve habitually done something that’s worked all your life doesn’t mean that there is not a new and better way to do it or that you have an excuse to be ignorant of things that can happen.  i’ll conclude by saying that we should form good habits, but be open to new ways to do things. We should always remain true to ourselves and our habits should always be encapsulated by the word of God. Be mindful of things that can happen as a result of your actions. And if you stump your toe, be more careful.

If you read this, i’d like feedback on what you think about habits.