Mind Forged Manacles: When Habit Becomes Reality


The problem with habits is that, because we repeat them so much and so often, they begin to resemble reality, as if by magic. Indeed, you could say the habit becomes our reality. It's as if the way we walk or sit, or breath, or hold a pen or cup in our hand, perform the same routine day in and day out, were as apparently fixed and absolute as the mountains.

In fact, the habit is merely a pattern of behavior (and our preception of it) that we have adapted to so comfortably and become accustomed to as the way things are. The way we drive our car, hold our head, talk from one side of our mouth; how we might repeatedly do the same things say after day, month after month, year after year. When these patterns because habit, ritual, they begin to take the shape of our understanding of reality. The habit becomes as fixed and permanent as our own arm, or eye color.

But this is only a case of believing that because we see it, it must be the way things are. This is a tremendously difficult force to work against - it is the very entropic rhythm we all feel undulating us toward death. When habit becomes reality, we are already a foot in the grave. This is why it's so important to change our routines, our habits. Maybe this is why getting sick is so cathartic, rejuvinating: an illness forces us out of our habit and sits our ass down and we have to pay attention to the body. Old habits are dismantled, and we realize that there's another layer to life, reality that we've been missing, just beyond the pale of our perception.