Habit

Imagine creating a cubist portrait of someone you love or know very well. Cubism would give you the chance to capture the myriad aspects of their personality.  You'd inevitably begin with some of the more dominant facets:  the stories they frequently tell so you can see them forming a backdrop to who they are now.  Past and present relationships, including family, of course.  Their passions--at least you hope they have passions!  Passions for books, opera, hiking, watching soccer, vinyl records. Worldview:  how do they see the human condition and human society, and conceive of their place in it? But you might find that you needed a small slice of a bright colour for their habits.

I remember vividly the beginning of my habit of playing four games of Solitaire--analog, with real decks of cards--before going to bed at night.  It was a dark and stormy night.  Lightning flashed and thunder rolled, but Bill and I had our bedroom window and curtains open because it was summer.  I love watching thunderstorms.  But the storm on that summer's night also reminded me of going to Silver Lake in Michigan, for a week's holiday, when I was about seven or eight.  It rained a lot, of course.  So my sister, Karen, who is seven years older than I am, taught me to play Solitaire, and when I got reasonably good, we'd play Double Solitaire, where any player can use the aces that have been uncovered.  Whoever wins their game first, wins. Obviously, Karen won most of the time.  But since then I've returned to Solitaire many times:  it appeals to the side of me that likes creating order.  You shuffle the cards to make them as random as possible, hide half your options while scrolling through the other half, trying to uncover and use the hidden half.  I became rather good at it, though I always knew when I needed a new deck of cards; when I couldn't win and couldn't win the cards were just too sticky. 

Once I got good at it, it became more than just four games of Solitaire; it became a kind of meditation, a probing of life's rules.  There are three different kinds of games.  Those you can win, one hand tied behind your back or half asleep.  These just unfold obligingly and I found they paralleled times in my past life and, I hope, my life to come, where life just worked.  I hadn't cajoled it into working nor did I deserve it; things simply fell into order.  It was the nature of the universe. Interestingly, these games are humbling.  They made me realize my success isn't always of my own making.  Sometimes the universe simply aligns.

There are games you just can't win, no matter how clever you are.  It's when the red ten you really need to move is actually covering both black jacks and one king so there's no way you can move it. There's a certain kind of comfort here, particularly if you are a writer trying to publish work.  Sometimes the editor's taste or the timing of your poem or the styles and subjects that are currently popular mean that no matter how successfully your poem captures life and experience and the world, no matter how effective your language is or how beautifully your form echoes sense, it's not going to be  published. 

Then there are the games that I can win if I'm clever.  These are actually my favourite because they suggest I have agency in the world. If I've got one red and one black ace, I can shift cards here and there, so I can finally get to that last overturned card.  If I don't jump on the chance to fill in a space with a king, but wait for the right king, or don't put my black threes on their aces because there are a couple of red twos hanging around and no red aces to give me somewhere to put them, effectively blocking a whole pile of cards I need, I can win this game.  Sometimes I have to be patient with how slowly it's coming, but I realize that order is slowly appearing, and I'm willing to just doggedly go on.  Life's like that a lot:  not all the wins are easy, but determination matters.

I've also learned that in Solitaire, as in communities and nature, diversity matters.  If I've got nothing but black cards and a mix of odds and evens, I may be screwed. If I have two pairs that don't play nicely together--say two red eights and two red sevens--I'll inevitably lose because four cards of the seven you have will never relate to one another.  Sometimes I play these out to make sure my assumptions still hold--and they do.  Again, it's like life.  If you just don't have enough variety, there are perspectives you will never uncover.

Habits are stepping stones, guiding you through your day.  They are handholds when you're feeling off kilter.  They are maps when you don't quite know where you're going.  We cling to them most when life is uncertain.  And if life isn't uncertain now, I don't know what it is. They're also part of our self-portrait.  That funny way you brush your teeth?  It's just you.  I always wipe the counters with a dishcloth, whether they need it or not, at the end of doing dishes.  That's not just me; that's a little bit of my mother. But they can also be caricatures.  I've developed a habit of bending way over to find something in my purse or struggle with the zipper on my coat.  (Zippers may be the thing I hate most about winter.) But Veronica has pointed out that I could stand up straight and bring my purse up or the zipper closer to my face.  I think she's also reacting to the fact that I turn myself into the parody of an old woman when I do that.  

Sometimes I only see a habit clearly when it's no longer serving  me as well as it did.  I think I'm close to giving up my four nightly games.  One reason I initially liked it was that there was no real point to it.  Nothing in my life, my knowledge, or my universe changed if I won or lost. It was forty minutes of being carefree before bed, and I spend very little of my life--except doomscrolling these days--doing things that are entirely pointless.  I'm making a baby quilt that's giving me a lot of pleasure, but it's neither pointless nor carefree.  (It's more green than grey, as it is in the photo above.) There's a real baby waiting for it, and there are twelve places where points must match exactly.  The quilt blocks you see at the top of the post should yield a Halo Quilt designed by Australian designer, Jen Kingwell.   I'm choosing fabrics for the Halo Quilt that read "gypsy tent." Someday there will be a quilt and someone will, I hope, be delighted with its whimsy, but I'm hand piecing it, so it's going to take a while.  I don't care:  it's fun. I thought of doing that in the hour before we go to sleep, but I'm afraid of leaving pins in the bed.