Making the Habit

Knowing where to stick it.

Yes, I admit it. I have run away. In the end it all got too much. As the friends list grew, I found myself with more sites to visit and read and comment – and I slowly got further and further behind.

There comes a point where you are so far behind that you just don’t know where to start – so you just don’t. I reached that point and in the end, I just had to let it go.

In one of those strange twists that life serves up, I saw a man wandering through the town this morning and I suddenly felt the need to capture the image. I needed to write.

He was at the vegetable counter, picking up carrots in manicured hands and inspecting them with glinting, grey eyes. It was the mustard yellow suit that made you notice him, before his confident gait air of authorative confidence made you take notice. Once drawn in , you couldn’t help but feel in the presence of a man with eccentricity that almost verged of rebellion.

In contrast to the white hair, neatly trimmed around a tanned and gleaming bald pate and round face with the minimum of wrinkles, he wore a daffodil yellow waistcoat stretched over a slight paunch. Under the waistcoat with a livid red and white checked shirt and a royal blue silk bow tie.

I moved to select some mushrooms and he strode of into cold meats. Our lives had touched and I knew that there was something I needed to record, ‘just in case’.

So now I have to get back into the habit. (Note 1) The positive habit of writing something every day.

Some time ago, a teacher told me that the secret of establishing a positive habit or breaking a negative habit was to make a conscious effort to do it for a month. The theory being that after a month it you will have established a habit and you will do it without thinking.

I can’t remember the teacher, but I have tried it before with other things. (Note 2) It kind of works so it is worth a try.

However, just in case, I think I shall practice my habit somewhere quiet, somewhere away from the temptations and distractions – and this time I shall not get carried away on a tide of ‘interestingness’, nor will I struggle finding pictures and formatting. I do this to write after all…

NOTE 1: That really should be easy. I have some humdinger habits that I have managed to keep for years! I still bite my nails when I am bored, I still crave tobacco (although nowadays I just follow smokers in the street until the craving dies or I get slapped). I talk to myself when I am trying to thing through a complex problem – which if I am also resolving my tobacco cravings can cause a few problems. Click to return

NOTE 2: Whatever the judge and the ‘gentlemen’ of the press says it was a valid experiment and I wasn’t lurking in those bushes and the camera was purely to photograph wildlife. Click to return