Habits walk
in unannounced. Afterward, they create indissoluble attachment with the owner.
Yes, habits are excellent (winning habits), but we have to acknowledge that
there are supplementary habits which sticks with us and peel off our skin at
times.
A very good
essay on Habit appeared in aeon.com “The lost hope of Self Help” by Jennifer
Ratner-Rosenhagen.
The author has
managed to illustrate / convey an assortment of definitions / aspects of habit
by leading personalities. In this post, I transport those paragraphs as is:
Gretchen Rubin, the author of another
bestseller, describes herself as a ‘happiness expert’ and argues that habits
are ‘the invisible architecture of our daily lives’
French philosopher Félix Ravaisson, in 1838,
described thus: ‘The progression of habit leads consciousness, by an
uninterrupted degradation, from will to instinct.’
Abigail van Buren, better known as ‘Dear
Abby’, is more upbeat: ‘A bad habit never disappears miraculously. It’s an
undo-it-yourself project.’
My favorite one
is by Montaigne:
Montaigne wrote, ‘habit is a violent and treacherous
schoolmistress. She establishes in us, little by little, stealthily, the
foothold of her authority… with the help of time, she soon uncovers to us a
furious and tyrannical face against which we no longer have the liberty of even
raising our eyes.’
James is a favourite because of his
‘fly-wheel’ metaphor, from his 1890 Principles of Psychology:
“Habit is … the enormous fly-wheel of
society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all
within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the
envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive
walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It
keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the winter; it holds the
miner in his darkness, and nails the countryman to his log-cabin and his lonely
farm through all the months of snow; it protects us from invasion by the
natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us all to fight out the
battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make
the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we
are fitted, and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social strata
from mixing. Already at the age of twenty-five you see the professional
mannerism settling down on the young commercial traveller, on the young doctor,
on the young minister, on the young counsellor-at-law. You see the little lines
of cleavage running through the character, the tricks of thought, the
prejudices … from which the man can … [not] escape. On the whole, it is best he
should not escape. It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of
thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.”
The excursion
and contact of habits can be examined by clicking the below path:
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