Greetings, friends. (XVIII)

Greetings, friends. Today I’d like to talk a little bit about habits.

But, first: How about that NFC championship game. Not at all what I was hoping for. The hand of Fate is fickle even to those lately graced by it. Maybe next year. I’m not mad. The Super Bowl ought to be pretty fun this year. Go Birds!

Habits. What are yours? I’m thinking about this today because, to be honest, after watching two football games and day-drinking all afternoon, I don’t super feel like writing! But I also told myself I would plan to take breaks from writing, rather than spontaneously taking a break out of laziness.

I tell my reports I want two weeks notice before they take time off from work, but when one of them comes to me saying her family arrives tomorrow, and can she take an extra day off to spend with them, sure, of course I say yes. I’m not a monster. She works hard. and time with family is more important than work anyway. But it’s still time off planned ahead of time, even if it’s the day beforehand. I owe myself the same diligence.

I went for a two mile walk with Jeanne just to be able to tell myself that I was merely swapping the 2½ mile run on my training plan for today with the 45 minutes of cross-training I’m supposed to do tomorrow. Walking is cross-training for endurance running. I’m sure I read that somewhere.

I am going to do the 2½ miles tomorrow, though. Hopefully a decent night’s sleep will purge all the abuse I did to myself today. The run I wrote about earlier that I struggled with was after a night of poor sleep. By contrast, after I wrote that post, I beefed up my playlist, got 10 hours of sleep, and shaved 30 seconds off my normal training pace the next day.

So, habits. If life has taught me anything, it’s that excellence comes through diligent, habitual refinement. I know this because the honest truth is that I have gotten where I am in life through a combination of (a.) being a white cis male American, (b.) being more or less intelligent to kind of improvise my way through most situations, and (c.) being strongly motivated by panic, especially in the face of impending, immovable deadlines.

This is not excellence, mind you. This is called succeeding at life on the easiest difficulty setting as a mediocre white man. But I look at the people around me and I know what excellence looks like. Excellence is talent multiplied by habit.

Obviously, at this stage of my life, I know better than to try to force myself to be excellent. I did swap my long run today for tomorrow’s “cross-training”. I do intend to keep my promise to myself to do tomorrow’s run. But what habits do I have?

Well, writing is a new one, but I’ve only done it for 18 days consecutively. Possibly to my detriment, because I’ve let other personal projects slide, while I doubled and tripled and quadrupled my intended daily commitment, because I was having fun. That’s not sustainable, but we’ll at least acknowledge that I’ve been doing it for over two weeks. (Incidentally, as I write this, my time is just about up.)

I’ve been keeping to my half-marathon training for about that long. So that’s another habit, but writing and running are almost too brand new to count.

What are the habits I’ve maintained over a longer duration. I take medication daily, when I remember. I have a weekly pill planner, which you’d think would help, but it does when I remember to fill it.

I bathe more or less daily, but that’s because I love taking hot showers, not because I have a profound moral commitment to cleanliness. Another thing I love doing is buzzing my scalp and neck, because I finally found a cordless, waterproof, electric foil razor that makes the job kind of fun. When I’m home, I put on loud music and the whole process is a pleasure, really.

Since last summer, whenever I’m home, I water my house plants every Monday. I chose Monday arbitrarily because I thought it would be good to just have a day on which I watered my plants. They haven’t died yet, and they stopped doing that thing where the tips of their leaves turn brown. If I made Monday the day I updated my mediplanner and recharged my electric razor, I would be just about set, wouldn’t I.

I eat three full meals a day, at least. But that’s less of a habit and more of a mortal necessity. I have developed some habits around cooking certain things for certain meals that seem to support my health and represent a nice balance between cost, enjoyment, and time investment.

But these entrenched habits are all maintenance habits — cooking, bathing, medicating, watering the house plants — these don’t contribute to my self-actualization, so much as support the process.

Note that sleep is not on this list.

I go to work five days a week, most weeks. I don’t know if that counts as a habit, exactly, but I do it. Sometimes that is a self-actualizing habit, but, again if I’m being honest, sometimes it is a self-maintenance habit. Self-actualizing at work is the height of bourgeois privilege, and I don’t forget it. I don’t do all my self-actualizing at work, anyway.

Actually, the one habit I have faithfully maintained for my own self-actualization, for years now, is learning Spanish using Duolingo. But I am over time and over word budget, so I will have to talk about that more later.

If you’re still reading this, I hope it’s becoming a habit. I send you my love. Ceterum censeo pro vigilum imperdiet cessandam est.