Practicing Habits

Old habits die hard.

Or so they say.  But what about habits that drift, just out of reach, no longer part of your day to day?  Close - and yet far. How do you get them back?  I suppose it’s true that old habits die hard - but isn’t getting habits back - or giving birth to new habits - harder still?

My high school sports were cross country in the fall and track in the spring, followed by 5k road races in the summer.  Organized to a fault, I kept a running journal, complete with the number of miles run per day and the adolescent musings of a teenage girl.  When I found one of these journals in my parents’ basement last summer, I smiled at the entry that read, “Invited to go to Canobie Lake Park.  Said no - still needed to go running today.”  I was addicted to running - to the endorphins and the meditation and the routine of it.  Until the fall of my junior year, that is, when I damaged my right lateral collateral and was under strict doctor’s orders not to run for a while.  Months later, when it was time to get back into shape, boy oh boy did I struggle to get back to the point where I would turn down a social invitation because “I still needed to go running that day.”  Recapturing that habit of running was hard, hard - did I say hard? - work.

I’ve been taking a creative non-fiction writing class at Stanford since the beginning of April.  Lots of reading in this class - reading books, articles, and perhaps most satisfying of all, reading the evolving writing of the other students in the class.  We tried our hand at writing exercises in class, too - things like “write about your earliest memory” or “write a bio, along the lines of Contributor’s Notes by Michael Martone.”  The writing has been fun - but the workshop has yielded the most mileage for me - deconstructing some great writing to figure out what makes it tick and tock. 

But the class has not been without cost.  I’ve lost a habit.  The spam comments that land in my mailbox remind me - daily, sigh - that there is an Alternate Version of Reality waiting for a post from me.  How to get a habit back?  And why did I let it go?  And is the class just an excuse?  So what if old habits die hard?  I’m more interested in the birth of habits.  Time to get some back.