Spontaneous routine

My great-grandmother used to remark in that terse, Missouri way of hers that a Methodist was just a Baptist in a rut. I’m not sure how true that is, but knowing that I appreciate routine almost as much as I appreciate spontaneity I wonder sometimes why we do things the way we do them.

I was thinking the other evening, as I often do while I do the dishes, about a trip I took to Key West. Lovely little island; flat as, well, something really flat, and small enough to walk, pedal, or be pedaled just about everywhere. And then I started to wonder: why is it that I think about Key West while I’m scrubbing noodles off a sauce pan? I think what first caused this activity-thought connection is the cartoony tiles I use as trivets on the stove; a frog on one and a pink flamingo standing in some water on the other, both of which make me smile and are not dishwasher safe. Scrubbing them free of food particles initially took me back to that trip: the warm breezes of February mornings, the sitting on the front porch of the coffee shop in the converted Victorian house that looked so out of place among the low-slung bungalows, my second shark sighting in open water. Good memories all. But I don’t wash the trivets every night – they don’t always need it – so what is it that takes me back there?

And wondering what it is, why that association is so strong, got me to thinking about the difference between discipline and habit.

Being who I am, I went right to AskOxford.com (yes, I was too lazy to get out the Compact OED; it’s been hot here, OK) for denotative definitions. I found these:

discipline

/dissiplin/

noun 1 the practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behaviour. 2 controlled behaviour resulting from such training. 3 a branch of knowledge, especially one studied in higher education.

verb 1 train in obedience or self-control by punishment or imposing rules. 2 punish or rebuke formally for an offence. 3 (disciplined) behaving in a controlled way.

— DERIVATIVES disciplinary adjective.

— ORIGIN Latin disciplina ‘instruction, knowledge’.

(As a side note: I would argue that “disciplined” is actually an adjective but what do I know.)

habit

noun 1 a settled or regular tendency or practice. 2 informal an addiction to drugs. 3 general shape or mode of growth, especially of a plant or mineral. 4 a long, loose garment worn by a member of a religious order.

verb archaic dress.

— ORIGIN Latin habitus ‘condition, appearance’, from habere ‘have, consist of’.

Connotatively the words are similar but not the same; discipline is something that is both instilled from without (you can learn it from others) and something that you impose upon yourself whereas habit is something you do by rote, without thinking, and often without pleasure.

Or is it that habit is merely discipline which you do not find onerous?

Writing teachers will tell you that trying to come to your writing through discipline is a sure way to kill any creative muse; that by making writing something you have to force rather than an aspect of your life that is as integral to your survival as breathing writing will become something you no longer really want to do.

Habits, too, are usually spoken of in the negative. We hardly ever speak of developing the habit of going for a walk or of eating a piece of fruit instead of 15 squares of Ghirardelli chocolate for dessert. True, some lifestyle educators talk about encouraging kids to develop “healthy habits” but when it comes to adults, habits are generally not something we encourage. This attitude envinces itself most convincingly in slang: why else would a drug problem be referred to as “a habit” ?

My romp through the dictionary brings me no closer to knowing why I think about Key West when I do dishes or about Albert Einstein when I clean the bathroom but I wouldn’t be surprised if one of my unconscious thought patterns turns out to be my Rosebud.