Archive of things to do with 'habit'

• 04.05.08 Depression, stalemate, and gridlock:

  A friend of mine was wondering about the Great Depression. The problem they saw goes something like this. Before the stock market crash, you had people doing needed work and receiving needed wages. There was a positive economic cycle: money changes hands between lenders, employers, workers, and consumers, each of them, so far as he remains in that cycle, becoming richer and getting more needs met. But then - boom! - a problem in New York, on a particular fall day…* and suddenly no one around the country is working any longer.

  Now, what sense does that make? The work is still there to be done. The people are still there to do it. The tools are available, there is time in which to do the work, there is time and nothing but time, there is too much time and nothing to do to fill it, and yet there is no work getting done. Everybody wants the work to get done, they can do the work, and they have the tools and the time; but nobody works. How can that be?

  
  Tags: psychology, work, thinking, money, value, habit, trust, love, traffic, depression, questions.
• 03.30.08 Biking and the city:

  Some of the best things in your life refuse to come to you except through luck, or as the backside of a problem. I didn’t choose it, but my fear of driving kept me from ever being dependent on a car. I’ve never owned a car, and never felt I had to. Admitting that I needed one, and mastering myself to the point of learning how to use one, would have been too high a price to pay. I think that’s a pretty rare bit of good fortune, in spite of all the humiliation and misery I felt during the six years I couldn’t overcome it.

  I still feel a little uncomfortable riding in a car, though I don’t panic or lose control any more, and I can talk about it now. And now, it’s really only discomfort: I don’t feel comfortable with the huge disproportion between the size and importance of what’s being transported (me), and the large, loud, bulky machinery that seems required to transport it. Mass transit is different, a bus would go where it was going regardless of whether I was on it. Walking was always how I preferred to get anywhere, but longer distances or regular transport I depended on the bus. Regular reading time, habitual mingling with people, breathing all their various smells, I find I need that even in my most withdrawn moods. A certain basic level of exposure to humanity, any kind of humanity, is part of what I require to keep myself sane.

  
  Tags: thinking, pace, anxiety, habit, transportation, city.
• 03.24.08 Turnaround two-step:

  A: A friend of mine asked me a question the other day. I think he wanted to know: was I happy? but for me, he put things in an interesting light. He said, I thought travel was the thing you loved most of everything. I thought you couldn’t live without it. And yet you’ve stayed here, in the same town, hardly leaving, for four years. You’ve made two cross-town moves but you live in basically the same way. And he was right in a way I don’t think he understood. Because what I love is the regular day-to-day. It’s the regular habits and routine I fall into, that is where my heart is, no matter how simple or homely it is. What I call travel, and I do love it, is just another way of enjoying a routine. It’s the same regularity and familiarity and warmth, renewed and refreshed by exposure to different places and different pressures. It’s a small kind of variety, but it’s the sort that suits me. I wouldn’t like the life on the road and the kind of life that would never show the same face twice, the life of the visitor on the surface. It’s the life of a resident for me.

  
  Tags: self, taste, travel, dialogue, perception, habit, interpretation.
• 03.20.08 New habits bear easy:

  I have started up a couple new habits recently. It makes me have to do things a little more deliberately, because I am still having to choose to do them instead of doing them automatically. But it’s important to keep changing habits, or at least it has become habitual, to me. There is something about a habit that shapes the time it is found in, or that flows through it. And old habits which I resurrect seem to bring with them a little bit of the former time, like a flavor of the atmosphere that you didn’t necessarily feel at the time. Like when you are away from home long enough that you notice how it smells on your return.

  It’s an accidental time capsule, like a picture of the pile of library books I had out at one time, or an old recipie file, there’s an atmosphere that comes with that. The ghost of a life that you used to live, ghosts being distortions in the air. I remember the carpet that I fell asleep on one night up late working on a short story I was writing, I was in the habit of walking every evening twenty minutes to work on it and not leave until I had met a certain word goal. I think I was seventeen, I was working late, I thought I would lie down and take a rest, and when I woke up I had a spotted red area on my cheek, but the carpet I was on had waves on it. I remember that result seemed unlikely. It’s a whiff of the past in the present. The feeling was alienating and it remains a little strange.

  
  Tags: blog, change, writing, thinking, time, memory, habit.