My left hand felt strange the whole day. There was a feeling of something missing from it, a feeling of lightness that even bordered with corporeal insubstantiality.
A friend had borrowed my watch in order to keep track of time during her exams (for some reason most German lecture halls do not have clocks and since the presence of phones, iPods, etc. is prohibited, a good old-fashioned watch becomes a necessity). Turns out, I was missing said watch and it's weight on my hand.
I thought this strange, because I never expected to grow that attached to a simple watch. This got me thinking about what other regular presences or activities I needed for comfort.
I haven't really give this much thought before because for a very long time (to be honest I don't even remember anymore when (if) it actually ended) I was on a campaign to deny habits in general. I claimed that they, in a more formalized form, led to the generation of rituals and traditions. These in turn often became the everyday embodiment of religions, with people fervently holding on to their particular rituals or traditions as if they possessed a meaning on their own and were not instead a set of often arbitrary or anachronistic actions/ideas that were assigned an equally often arbitrary or anachronistic meaning. I never seemed to comprehend why people voluntarily refused to reassign these meanings or change sets of actions, thus depriving themselves of the power that was responsible for creating the traditions in the first place. I wanted to have nothing to do with all such "nonsense" and so tried to live my life without acquiring anything that might be considered a habit. To be honest, I am far from certain that I was successful in this, but instead got very good at ignoring whatever habits I did have.
I suspect this all might have been a result some sort of teenage rebellion that I simply forgot to revise in the following years. I cannot, of course, say for sure, but seem like the most plausible explanation for such a vehemently extreme position.
Well, whatever it was, it appears to be over. I will now proceed to list all of the things (some of them living) that can be, I think, considered as habits. I will admit that my definition of habits in this post is somewhat loose and for a couple of things listed the word attachment would most likely be more appropriate.
Getting up early/Breakfast:
To me a day is lost, if I got out of bed after noon and doubly so if I missed breakfast. It is, of course, necessary to note that I am in college and for me an average early day starts at nine or ten in the morning, but all of that is relative. It is in any case important to grab something to eat or drink even if it is cup of tea. Breakfast (or an equivalent) is the only official meal I sometimes have in a day (snacks don't count, mind you).
Physical Exercise:
This did not really start until I got into exercising regularly in the first place. Until I joined the UMass fencing team, I was perfectly happy limiting my movements to an occasional bike ride (it is true that one of them was 25 miles long, but that was an exception). This need is opposed by the following one.
Slothing time:
There are a couple of days every month, when I'd rather not see anyone and am perfectly happy doing useless things like staring at walls blankly or roaming around my house or the outdoors without a plan. Once upon a time I thought this was a weird necessity, but the more people I talk to nowadays, the more I discover that the necessity is fairly common to humans. There, now it is official: I have a common ground (and a potential topic of conversation) with most of my species. Now I feel a part of something big, bigger than me or any of its individual members: the set of people, who like to waste their time doing absolutely nothing productive or useful.
People:
I have heard there are people capable of surviving on an uninhabitable island without human contact for years but still remain happy and sane. I even think I know one such person. I also know that it is not me.
I require regular interaction with fellow humans, even if it is just a meaningless grunt or an awkward joke. I like watching people happen, sometimes I like to take part in the happening as well, occasionally contributing an (in)appropriately ridiculous grimace here or an often crass comment there. I genuinely find the whole mess of human interactions (for I firmly believe it is a mess where we all have only a very approximate notion of what exactly is going on at a given moment) quite entertaining and captivating. Without it my life would be immensely much more boring. If there were no people around me, I would also have nowhere to channel a certain kind of indescribable energy and desire to socialize. I would like to thank people, especially the ones close to me (conventionally called friends, I believe) for sticking around and making life truly bearable.
Family and Cats:
A quite special subclass of the aforementioned "people" group is my family. I fairly certain that among the people I know I am one of the closest connections with my parents and sisters (over 7 years together in an 18 m2 room of a two room Moscow apartment one gets to know the people one shares these things very well). My family are the only people I have consistently spoken to regularly for more than 5 years.
In my case it is also impossible to mention the family without saying a word or two about cats. For as long as I remember my family has always had at least one of these beasts (most of the time more than one). Thus for me they have become an inseparable part of the family gestalt.
Fazit
In conclusion I would like to say that to me writing these things down had a somewhat cathartic effect. For some reason it felt nice writing down some unoriginal yearnings and attachments. Perhaps it was because I defined them on paper for the first time.
A friend had borrowed my watch in order to keep track of time during her exams (for some reason most German lecture halls do not have clocks and since the presence of phones, iPods, etc. is prohibited, a good old-fashioned watch becomes a necessity). Turns out, I was missing said watch and it's weight on my hand.
I thought this strange, because I never expected to grow that attached to a simple watch. This got me thinking about what other regular presences or activities I needed for comfort.
I haven't really give this much thought before because for a very long time (to be honest I don't even remember anymore when (if) it actually ended) I was on a campaign to deny habits in general. I claimed that they, in a more formalized form, led to the generation of rituals and traditions. These in turn often became the everyday embodiment of religions, with people fervently holding on to their particular rituals or traditions as if they possessed a meaning on their own and were not instead a set of often arbitrary or anachronistic actions/ideas that were assigned an equally often arbitrary or anachronistic meaning. I never seemed to comprehend why people voluntarily refused to reassign these meanings or change sets of actions, thus depriving themselves of the power that was responsible for creating the traditions in the first place. I wanted to have nothing to do with all such "nonsense" and so tried to live my life without acquiring anything that might be considered a habit. To be honest, I am far from certain that I was successful in this, but instead got very good at ignoring whatever habits I did have.
I suspect this all might have been a result some sort of teenage rebellion that I simply forgot to revise in the following years. I cannot, of course, say for sure, but seem like the most plausible explanation for such a vehemently extreme position.
Well, whatever it was, it appears to be over. I will now proceed to list all of the things (some of them living) that can be, I think, considered as habits. I will admit that my definition of habits in this post is somewhat loose and for a couple of things listed the word attachment would most likely be more appropriate.
Getting up early/Breakfast:
To me a day is lost, if I got out of bed after noon and doubly so if I missed breakfast. It is, of course, necessary to note that I am in college and for me an average early day starts at nine or ten in the morning, but all of that is relative. It is in any case important to grab something to eat or drink even if it is cup of tea. Breakfast (or an equivalent) is the only official meal I sometimes have in a day (snacks don't count, mind you).
Physical Exercise:
This did not really start until I got into exercising regularly in the first place. Until I joined the UMass fencing team, I was perfectly happy limiting my movements to an occasional bike ride (it is true that one of them was 25 miles long, but that was an exception). This need is opposed by the following one.
Slothing time:
There are a couple of days every month, when I'd rather not see anyone and am perfectly happy doing useless things like staring at walls blankly or roaming around my house or the outdoors without a plan. Once upon a time I thought this was a weird necessity, but the more people I talk to nowadays, the more I discover that the necessity is fairly common to humans. There, now it is official: I have a common ground (and a potential topic of conversation) with most of my species. Now I feel a part of something big, bigger than me or any of its individual members: the set of people, who like to waste their time doing absolutely nothing productive or useful.
People:
I have heard there are people capable of surviving on an uninhabitable island without human contact for years but still remain happy and sane. I even think I know one such person. I also know that it is not me.
I require regular interaction with fellow humans, even if it is just a meaningless grunt or an awkward joke. I like watching people happen, sometimes I like to take part in the happening as well, occasionally contributing an (in)appropriately ridiculous grimace here or an often crass comment there. I genuinely find the whole mess of human interactions (for I firmly believe it is a mess where we all have only a very approximate notion of what exactly is going on at a given moment) quite entertaining and captivating. Without it my life would be immensely much more boring. If there were no people around me, I would also have nowhere to channel a certain kind of indescribable energy and desire to socialize. I would like to thank people, especially the ones close to me (conventionally called friends, I believe) for sticking around and making life truly bearable.
Family and Cats:
A quite special subclass of the aforementioned "people" group is my family. I fairly certain that among the people I know I am one of the closest connections with my parents and sisters (over 7 years together in an 18 m2 room of a two room Moscow apartment one gets to know the people one shares these things very well). My family are the only people I have consistently spoken to regularly for more than 5 years.
In my case it is also impossible to mention the family without saying a word or two about cats. For as long as I remember my family has always had at least one of these beasts (most of the time more than one). Thus for me they have become an inseparable part of the family gestalt.
Fazit
In conclusion I would like to say that to me writing these things down had a somewhat cathartic effect. For some reason it felt nice writing down some unoriginal yearnings and attachments. Perhaps it was because I defined them on paper for the first time.
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