Here comes a very entertaining problem, the question of the value
of habits. Good habits save time and energy, tend to eliminate
useless labor and make for peace and quiet. But there is a large
body of persons who come to value habits for themselves and,
indeed, this is true to a certain extent of all of us. Once an
accustomed way of doing things is established it becomes not only
a path of least resistance, but a sort of fixed point of view,
and, if one may mix metaphors a trifle, a sort of trunk for the
ego to twine itself around. There is uneasiness in the thought of
breaking up habits, an uneasiness that grows the more as we
become older and is deepened into agony if the habit is tinged
with our status in life, if it has become a sort of measure of
our respectability. Thus a good housekeeper falls into the habits
of doing things which were originally a mark of her ability,
which she holds as sacred and values above her health and energy.
There are people who fiercely resent a new way of doing things;
they have woven their most minor habits into their ego feeling
and thus make a personal issue of innovations. These are the
upholders of the established; they hate change as such; they are
efficient but not progressive. In its pathological form this type
becomes the "health fiends" who never vary in their diet or in
their clothing, who arise at a certain time, take their "plunge"
regardless, take their exercise and their breakfasts alike as a
health measure without real enjoyment, etc., who grow weary if
they stay up half an hour or so beyond their ordinary bedtime;
they are the individuals who fall into health cults, become
vegetarians, raw food exponents, etc.
Opposed to the group that falls into habits very readily is the
group that finds it difficult to acquire habitual ways of working
and living. All of us seek change and variety, as well as
stability. Some cannot easily form habits because they are
quickly bored by the habitual. These restless folk are the
failures or the great successes, according to their intelligence
and good fortune. There is a low-grade intelligence type, without
purpose and energy, and there is a high-grade intelligence type,
seeking the ideal, restless under imperfection and restraint,
disdaining the commonplace and the habits that go with it. Is
their disdain of habit-forming and customs the result of their
unconventional ways, or do their unconventional ways result
because they cannot easily form habits? It is very probable that
the true wanderer and Bohemian finds it difficult, at least in
youth, to form habits, and that the pseudo-Bohemian is merely an
imitation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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