HABITS
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| Athletes Running. 1881. Photographs by Eadweard Muybridge. |
PART I
You should understand this is just a strategy to build back a habit of writing. And so the “you” in this whole thing is really just “me.”
Or perhaps the “you” is the possibility of a you. Or, more accurately, the threat of one.
I have a weird relationship with habits; however, I suspect everyone does. Meaning: it is weird to live in a body that is wired for a primeval type of survival. So wired, in fact, that it sometimes can’t help doing deadly things. The same neurochemical reinforcement system that pushed a hairy ancestor of ours towards emotionally rewarding feats inspires in me a deep love of cigarettes, even when I am many years away from my last one.
In other words, living in a body is being in control of a thing whose fundamental machinery is profoundly out of your control. So much so, that sometimes it feels as if any benefit is overshadowed by the mere cost of care, like you’ve been gifted a humpback whale. What do I do with this?
And then, other times, living in a body is sublime. Movement is ecstasy. Food—even healthful food—is forever wonderful. Sleep is intoxicating. And physical contact with another human being is enough to make you believe that life actually does have external meaning.
All of this is true. All at the same time.
And so: as I do the batten-down-the-hatches routine that is preparing for middle age, I am trying to develop some good habits. As a result, I’ve mitigated a little the weirdness of living in a body and found a little joy in the process.
Admittedly, this whole thing is pretty self-indulgent. In fact, I’ve been wondering if that is actually what I find rewarding, this unabashed navel-gazing (which should be the name of this very collection of writings, shouldn’t it?). But maybe that’s just the psychology of self-improvement? There’s a puzzle-solving edge to it that lies in the question of, not “how can I be better?” but rather, “who the hell am I?”
Actually, it’s more fundamental than that. It’s “what the hell am I?”
PART II
People who should know say that habits have three fundamental parts: first is the cue, which is the whatever-it-is that inspires a behavior; then there is the routine, which is the actual behavior; finally there is the reward, which is the thing that reinforces that behavior and causes your whole body to remember the whole process for later.
As we all likely know from experience, the cue can be incredibly subtle, the routine fully justifiable, and the reward profoundly meaningful. But the whole story is really just chemicals and electricity bobbing around in the basal ganglia, a brain part that scientists provocatively call “one of the oldest.”
I really like that phrasing, referring to brain parts as old and new. Mostly because it describes one situation where old does not mean wise. Here old means base, in multiple senses of the word. And the story that phrasing suggests is a story about how one day this three-part habit code sprang to life inside some precocious little ape brain and, the next thing you know, we have fried pickles and vape pens and AI sextbots.
This makes sense to me.
Internet culture has given us perhaps the best language to talk about our brains and bodies, specifically when it gave us the mythology of an all-knowing black-box algorithm. The idea is that some programmers create a clever bit of code that carries out some calculations they don’t really totally understand, they embed it into some innocent looking program, you give that program some banal personal facts, and then suddenly TikTok knows you better than your spouse.
Our brain is the OG black-box algorithm, an incomprehensible map of if/then statements that we use to pretend to make decisions. It feels like free will because it’s only the coding that’s prewritten, not the actual outcome. We just can’t see and feel with our ape brains and ape hearts that the code and course of our lives are one in the same. Our prewritten fates are not necessarily out there in the world, cosmic strings pulling our limbs, or some story written in some heavenly book. Our prewritten fates are written in our bodies, in the coding and chemicals and causal systems that are both the total of us and a mystery to us.
Cue. Routine. Reward.
It’s all just a slot-car ride and all we really do is decide to enjoy it or not. Although, a proclivity towards enjoyment is surely part of the algorithm too.
PART III
Lately I have been really enjoying calisthenics, which are simply (and I didn’t know this before I started) body weight exercises. I’ve been doing beginner versions of some classic calisthenic moves: incline pushups, horizontal pull ups, half squats, that kind of thing.
I enjoy the simplicity and repetition of it. When you do sets of fifty reps you can really lose yourself in focusing on form and breath. It's a kind of trance where the burn can become a type of pleasure, more interesting than painful.
I enjoy the feeling of soreness the next day, how I can identify by feeling sets of muscles that I never thought about before, how I can sense these muscles working throughout the day to perform the simplest of tasks, and how I then can enjoy a little gratitude that this machinery works as it does.
But mostly I enjoy the synthesis that takes place between me and my body. When I’ve exercised, I can move through the world as a unified thing, not a brain that can’t be troubled with the warning cries of my body nor a body that can’t carry out the commands of my brain. It’s all just me.
And it feels good. I’m all one thing. Dynamic and resilient. Purposeful. Making the most of what I’ve been given.
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References:
“Habits: How They Form And How To Break Them.” Fresh Air. NPR. 5 March 2012. Terry Gross. WHYY.
Muybridge, Eadweard. "Athletes Running." 1881. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2009630513/. Accessed 10 July 2023.
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