Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” — Aristotle

I am creature of habit. Obsessively, Jane might say. I’m happiest doing the same, at the same time, eating the same, wearing the same. I enjoy novelty, too – travel, discovery, surprise – but only as spice on the satisfying sufficiency of sameness. Too much variety and I lose my strength, like Antaeus hoisted from his soil.

Dog-pal Henry and I share this trait. He’s up for any adventure, but homecoming is his ecstasy. How he greets our return, zigzagging his rooms wildly, picking up and discarding familiar toys, pouncing on favorite chairs. It’s almost worth leaving him (briefly) to experience his exuberance. Why this delight, we wonder? Did he imagine us “gone for good” (which does not sound good)? No, no imaginer he, here and now are his only address. What he celebrates is the resumption of the expected, where he knows who he is because he knows where we are (for we exist only in relation).

America decries such a torpid attitude. “New” is marketers’ favorite adjective. Capitalism depends on our impatience to stimulate our spending. “New” on supermarket shelves – or in the car dealer’s showroom – implies improved. Fashion coerces consumption. Who wants to be yesterday, fuddy-duddy, old hat!

Each of us may be located on a spectrum extending from stay-at-home/stick-in-the-mud/same old at one end to bored/restless/novelty-seekers at the other. What about our placement reveals our nature?

It’s not, I’m pretty sure, lack of curiosity that keeps me home. A decade-plus of these daily inquiries with pals testifies to that. I always want to know more – but more about less, not the reverse. The superficial bores me – what can you learn from a glance? Everything looks different – so what? My fascination is the substratum of experience, the dirt beneath our flowerings, the urges and urgencies we share. I want to understand you by understanding myself – and that takes digging, mucking in mysteries that precede the momentary. What’s happening in today’s headlines has always happened and will again, till our species vanishes. When we say “unprecedented” we should add “in recent memory.” The Nameless One startles only because we haven’t looked far enough. This nightmare has happened before – and will again.

To discover similarities, we must keep surfaces still, so they don’t distract. Each of us manifests the immemorial if we gaze deeply. Robert Frost dramatizes this in one of my favorite poems:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedOthers taunt me with having knelt at well-curbsAlways wrong to the light, so never seeingDeeper down in the well than where the waterGives me back in a shining surface pictureMe myself in the summer heaven godlikeLooking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.Water came to rebuke the too clear water.One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a rippleShook whatever it was lay there at bottom,Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

Habit keeps my present still, so I can hold my chin against the well-curb and stare into depths. I resent wasting my mind on what to eat for breakfast, I want to see what breakfast – and this morning – and my existence mean. I’ll never know, of course – “truth? A pebble of quartz?” – but even the least hint thrills. “For once, then, something!”