What Cannot Habit Accomplish?
I’m no ascetic, wearing a hairshirt and whipping my flesh and bonking myself in the forehead with the holy books like those guys in Python’s In Search of the Holy Grail. I believe Mary Oliver when she writes–
You do not have to be good
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert repenting
I’m down with that, though on some days it’s easy to imagine myself as a cowled and cloistered monk in a small cell, arising for my daily devotional in the cold, getting ready for matins. I’m sitting here, hoodie pulled up over my head, writing by flashlight in the quiet predawn and getting up to pace back and forth holding a mug, warm with coffee, like a goblet, working on and extracting lessons from the Gospel of Gratitude.
The Dalai Lama wrote a book riffing on how compassion is the thread connecting all the religions of the world. I wonder where gratitude fits in with that. It may be beyond religious practice, just a human practice. Say thank you, before, after and during everything that happens, even if you don’t feel thankful. Not very complicated.
Yet, I am going to whine like a baby right now and just say that I don’t want to do this today. Not at all. But the cool thing is (and this filled up the space right after the “don’t want,” like the draftwash behind a subway train), even though I could choose not to do it, I will do it anyway. That is the power of habit. I remember that Ishmael, narrating the events of Moby Dick, asked “What cannot habit accomplish?”
Habits can win the day, once established, they can give freedom. Commitment and habit are twins, really, perhaps like myth and ritual are, ritual being the visible enactment of a myth, in that sense. Habit is a commitment, hardened like pottery dried and cured. I have come to trust myself about this, no matter how I feel, and I’m grateful for whatever caused it.
It just seems so slow and ponderous, sometimes, trying to capture the essential word out of the universe, all objects moving at light speed. Like asking “Is it quicker to New York or by bus?” A complete non-sequitur, different mediums altogether. Makes me feel panicky at the impossibility of keeping up. I can’t physically do it. If I commit to one sentence, I move to the shoulder of the road and other ones flash by uncaptured in the fast lane. Feels childish and immature, but it still shows up, even after doing 277 of these little posts.
Upon what can I focus? How can I be present and in this moment declare what I’m grateful for, when there is so much else that will go unsaid?
Then I see an image of myself wearing this ratty old balaclava in order to be warm inside the house, in lieu of heat. First time I had put it on this season. The gear is thirty two years old, dating back to climbing Denali in May 1986. I still have a photo showing it on my head and wreathing my face while frozen snot runs down my beard. Ah, the heretofore untold romance of expeditionary mountaineering.
Still, I love this thing, I’m grateful for it and the instant connection to that time in my life. It still keeps me warm, though full of moth holes and discolored in lots of places. I should doubtless never be seen wearing it outside the house.
I also see now that, even with my whining, real words have been produced where there was only an empty and imposing page. A simple thing like a wool knit cap. It’s due to this inquiry about gratitude, the holy grail of sussing out what and how much I already have in my life, definitely a context, an organizing principle, a magnetic north, a Big Dipper.
