Which Came First? The Habit or the Role?

Dear Friends,

It feels like a long time since we last chatted, though, according to my calendar, it’s been only a few weeks. How are you? What’s new? What have been your high moments lately? What have been your lows?

I have been doing a lot of thinking about habits lately. Not the chew your fingernails or alphabetize your soup cans type habits. I’m talking about the personal and emotional habits that make you . . .well, you. The habits that form your role in your life.

Do you have a habit of making lists and organizing people and things that makes you the planner? Do you have a habit of playing devil’s advocate , and are the intermediary? Do you have a habit of cracking jokes (at maybe an inappropriate time) as the comic relief?

And then this, of course, leads me down the path of asking, what came first? The role or the habit?

Are thrust into different roles out of necessity, or maybe our parents or caregivers preconceived notions of who we are, and then habits are formed to accommodate that role? Or are our habits ingrained in us from the beginning and we naturally fall into our roles? 

My habit? Falling down the rabbit hole of questions. I don’t know what role I play because of that — writer, I guess. Imaginer of lives, situations, and whole worlds sometimes.

And now that I’ve dragged you down this hole far enough, let’s scratch a little deeper. Let’s say you have your role and your habit. Is it possible to keep one but not the other? If you’re the planner, always have been, can you just stop the planning when people are depending on you to do it? Maybe you still have all your lists, but now they’re just yours and everyone else is left to run all nilly-willy.  Can you stop being the intermediary all the while seeing both sides? Can you refuse to break the tension in a group and instead choose only to tell your jokes only at appropriate light-hearted moments?

And if the answer is yes, what sort of ripple effect does that cause?

See? I told you I like to fall down the rabbit hole. But, I promise, all of this has a point.  

But for right now, I’m going to leave you with these questions as I continue to fall, hoping to catch on to a tree root somewhere to help pull myself back up to the surface.

Until next time,