Come back

FAR BE IT for me to add to the habit discourse, a field so overgrown with weeds that we must wade in with machete in hand, but I’m going to chance it. We are in the first month of the year, in the late middle of that month, a time when habits looked upon with novelty and eager commitment begin to look a little dull or heavy, a moment when a “streak” is likely to come to an abrupt and regretful end. The problem I want to draw your attention to isn’t the interruption of the habit—which was inevitable—but the fact that the streak mentality transforms an interruption, a pause, into a failure, a score set back to zero. Now you must start over again, as if you hadn’t done something for eighteen or twenty or one hundred days, but were doing it for the first time, only now with a deficit, because you must catch up to your old score. The longer the streak, the harder the restart, the more punishing the interlude.

The theory behind a streak is that by making that break into a penalty, you will be less likely to take it. Fair enough. But you will take a break someday, because a body needs breaks. A habit isn’t built on successive days or weeks, enumerated and enumerable. A habit is built on the movement of return. It’s coming back to something, again and again, in precise rhythms or otherwise, that transforms an effort into a habit, an act of will into an act of way.

In meditation, you learn quickly that even while your body is still, your mind moves and scatters, drifts and wanders. The point in meditation isn’t to stop thinking—that’s impossible. It’s to notice that you’ve wandered off the path, and come back, again and again and again. To come back to the breath, the only habit we only ever break once.

It can seem frivolous in times like these to think of making new habits. What’s a habit against an occupation, against a genocide, against a dictatorship? What matters about journaling, or doing our art, or moving our bodies, or taking a walk in the midst of a dying empire? But if we do not make our own habits, they will be made for us, by forces who want us isolated, anesthetized, consumed, harried in our work lives and sloven in our spirits. What we do is who we are, and we remake ourselves each time we come back to the work that matters, the work of becoming free. If you’ve wandered off—when you wander off—you have only to return.