Why Routines Are Not Always Ruts

Ed Vasicek

A while back I lost hearing in one ear. I made an appointment with my doctor and suggested the problem might be sinus pressure. He corrected me: my problem was earwax. After the physician removed the blockage, my hearing instantly returned.

But a strange thing happened: I was now hearing all sorts of things. When I walked, I could hear the fabric of my pants rubbing. I heard birds and trucks and high frequency noises that I didn’t remember hearing before. After a few days, my experience returned to normal and I heard just as I had before.

What happened? The answer is that my mind selectively targeted what to focus upon and what to blot out. It did this by habit.

Let me share two major advantages of habits, routines, and unwritten rules.

Discussion

Holy Habits Forming the Will

SI Filings

“Many of the Puritans believed that habits gave a person the capacity for greater obedience in the future…..’every act of obedience doth increase the ability to obey. Every step reneweth strength.’” - Ref21

Discussion

The Puritans on Habits and Spiritual Maturity

SI Filings

“The Puritans believed that habits were a means of cultivating spiritual maturity in the believer by giving a believer a greater capacity for future obedience, by uniting a believer’s will to God’s, and by conforming a believer to the image of Christ.” - Ref21

Discussion

“In much of life we build habits and patterns the way people build roads.”

SI Filings

“The man who grumbles in his heart will soon grumble before his household and before his fellow church members. He has begun to walk a trail of complaint and will find that others begin to follow in his footsteps, that they begin to imitate him….But what is true of bad habits is equally true of good.” - Challies

Discussion

Virtue and Vice in an Age of Addiction

SI Filings

“ ‘Accessibility, affordability, advertising, anonymity, and anomie, the five cylinders of the engine of mass addiction,’ writes David T. Courtwright in his new, one might say compulsively readable book about bad habits becoming big business, The Age of Addiction.” - The American Conservative

Discussion