Month: October 2018

Meaningful Habits

This morning I got to thinking about rituals, routines and habits.

This is some information I found from the internet:

The difference between a routine and a ritual is not necessarily the action, but the attitude behind the action. To many, a routine is getting up every morning, eating breakfast, brushing your teeth, taking a shower, getting dressed, and going to work. … However, rituals are viewed as more meaningful practices.

A habit is an action we do often in a regular and repeated way. Routine is a regular way of doing things in a particular order. The main difference between habit and routine is that habit is a recurrent with little or no conscious thought whereas routine require a high degree of intention and effort.

I’m still a little confused.  I guess it is just a matter of degrees.  I got to thinking about all of this because my husband is on a business trip.  Because of this, our morning routines/rituals and our evening routines/rituals are shook up a little bit.

Our typical morning “routine” consists of my husband going to the gym freakishly early.  (He can have that part of the routine all to himself.)  When he arrives home from the gym, I saunter out to the kitchen, where our two youngest children are eating breakfast, gathering their stuff to head to school and either stressing about upcoming tests or joking about upcoming events, depending on the schedule.  I take out and feed our dogs and when I come back inside my husband has poured my coffee into one of our many mugs.  I like to think that he chooses “the mug of the day” deliberately and carefully as all of our mugs have some meaning to us.  We have collected them from vacations, our college, our children’s college, and sometimes just from quirky impulsive shopping days.  I recently purchased a mug that says, “T.J. Maxx is my spirit animal” on one of those more impulsive shopping excursions.

After kissing the kids and sending them on their way, we saunter back to our bedroom, where I read The Daily Skimm, some headline stories and our horoscopes to my husband while he gets ready for work.  After he leaves, I head out to my desk to start writing my blog.

I suppose that is just our morning “routine”, but considering how much I miss it when he is gone, I see it more as our morning “ritual.”  I have my own “rituals” when he is out of town, too.  Last night, we had Chick-Fil-A for dinner.  This meal is almost a given when my husband is out of town.  My kids put in their orders without even asking me “What’s for dinner?”  I also just reserved on Redbox a strange, indie documentary film for me to watch tonight.  I’m greatly looking forward to it and I am sure that my husband is relieved to not have to watch it with me.  We watch more traditional films when we are together, so I save my more “out of the box” film choices for when he is traveling.

Every year and every season our routines change a little bit.  I guess when what we do during a new routine becomes habitual, it becomes more meaningful to us.  When our habits and routines become more meaningful we see them more as “ritual”, almost becoming sacred to us.  I imagine if we really examined our everyday routines, our holiday traditions, our vacation and trip plans, etc. we would see just how much habit/routine/ritual plays into the big picture.  We usually don’t notice this, until a change-up occurs or when something unusual disrupts the flow, but it is really true that we are creatures of habit.  I think that the examining of our habits/routines/rituals is a smart thing to do, though.  Perhaps some things are just habits and perhaps they aren’t particularly meaningful or helpful or even healthy for us anymore.  Maybe little tweaks here and there to our every day practices could start a ripple effect, allowing even more creativity and excitement and anticipation to enter into our every day lives.  And at the very least, by examining the actions that have become like rituals to us, we can be thankful for all of the real meaning and comfort that we do have in our daily lives without even realizing it.

What Do You Say?

We have a phrase in our family that we have said for over a decade.  Whenever one of us talks about fun upcoming plans, or an interesting day, in our perkiest sing-songiest voices, with our heads rocking back and forth we say, “That’s cool!  That’s fun!”

That much-used family phrase came about from an encounter on a school bus that my middle two sons had with a cute little girl who asked them if they were twins and they said, “No, we’re just brothers.”

“That’s cool!  That’s fun!” she replied as she hung over the top of her seat on the bus trying to make new friends for the school year.  That was the first reported story of that particular school year and that particular phrase has “stuck” in our family for all of these years.  I imagine most families and people have borrowed phrases that become part of their history, their vernacular, their being.

My friend would always say, “Dammit, Jim,” in her best “Dr. McCoy from Star Trek” voice whenever something annoying would happen.  Although I have never been a Star Trek fan, I decided to mimic it until I owned it because it helped me to keep my potty mouth at a respectable level.  Recently my daughter, who has probably never seen Star Trek, asked me about this quirky habit of mine and she said, “Who’s Jim?”

“No worries!” is another one I copied.  Some kindly man said that to me probably two decades ago and it made me feel so good, I decided it had to be part of my vocabulary to pass along.  My husband likes to quote from movies.  He has held on to Billy Bob Thorton’s, “Some folks call it a slingblade . . . ” for a long, long time only because I think he likes to do that deep guttural “Mmmmm-hmmmm” at the end of the quote.

I could go on and on and I’m sure everyone else can do the same with their family’s phraseology.  It’s the things like these that make a person or a family, so uniquely them; a part of them that makes them so divinely special and different from the crowd.   It’s the little things, like shared phrases and nicknames that make us feel connected to our loved ones.

When my eldest son first headed to college, my daughter and I couldn’t stop crying.  In a misguided emotional moment, I told her that we should think of all of the things that annoy us about him so that we wouldn’t feel so bad and miss him so much.  That was a fail.  It just made us sob harder, because when you focus on all of the attributes of a person, you are understanding every little detail of what makes that person so alive to you and you are realizing how well you know and love that person.

At this middle age stage of our lives, it is almost certain that we have all gone through the very painful experience of losing people whom we love.  It is in those dark moments of loss, that in wanting to save a clear memory of that person, that we think of all of the little details, quirks and nuances that made that particular loved one who they were to us and who they were to the world.  It’s rarely the big things that serve as a reminder of the essence of a person or a family or a group of friends, but a mixture of all of the special little moments, looks, laughs, habits, scents, ways of moving, ways of speaking, inside jokes and understandings, etc. that bring a smile of recognition and joy to our hearts.

What are some phrases that are part of you?  Where did they come from?  What’s the story behind them?  These are just some of the ways “you are being you” in the world and someone or many someones, are noticing that and treasuring that about you.