What do we do when our habits become rote?

More reflections on habits & how endurance itself is a formational practice

Advent greetings!

Well, the experiment is working. I’ve shown up for fourteen consecutive Fridays to write here on the ol’ substack. I am really great at ideating about habits, making lists of supplies for habits, shopping for habits, and starting habits. My track record for keeping habits, however, is less impressive. I guess I like beginnings. This habit is starting to feel a little stale, and I’m tempted to find ways to revitalize it.

I get so jazzed at the start of a new friendship, imagining all the ways my new bestie and I will show up at each other’s houses unannounced and talk about our traumas or the latest episode of whatever show we’re watching (there is no in between) while I beg my children to PLEASE get their own snacks, already.

Every time I visit a new restaurant I get hopelessly attached, scheming all the ways I will become a regular, how I will work my way through the menu, and who I want to take with me on each visit.

I get especially carried away when I start a new job or move into a new house or heaven help me, a new city. My notes app overfloweth with programs, recipes, restaurant lists, design preferences, and floor plans. Just the hint of a new job in a new city for either one of us in recent years sends me to Zillow (I know some of you do it too).

But once the friendship is settled, the restaurant feels routine, the new job feels like… a job, and my boxes are unpacked, I get deep in the doldrums. Actually, I’ve learned that anytime we move cities or homes within a familiar city, even, I need a good 4-6 month adjustment period to just feel all my big, sad, overwhelmed, anxious feelings. It always catches me off guard because I was so excited before. Where did that excitement go? And why has it been replaced with anxiety?

I think I’ve reached that point with my writing. The new coffee shop routine each week sure helps, but I find myself drawn to trying to reinvigorate the practice. I texted a girlfriend today wondering about how to make my Substack more official, more legit. She said, “You usually go through cycles of wondering what the purpose of things are, especially the Substack.”

Um, excuse me. Rude. (only because you are right)

Once I get to the middle of something, I fizzle out. I lose interest. I need a way to make it fun again. And to make it fun, for me, I have to make it meaningful. Such a double edged sword, this meaning-making business! Much as I try, things can’t just be things for me. There must be a REASON.

I have long been compelled by this line in Eucharistic Prayer A in the Book of Common Prayer:

“Sanctify us also that we may faithfully receive this holy Sacrament, and serve you in unity, constancy, and peace; and at the last day bring us with all your saints into the joy of your eternal kingdom.”

Constancy. What a word.

Faithfulness, as a word, gets a lot of attention. It’s a romantic idea, isn’t it? Pledging faithfulness sometimes feels like something you do in the beginning, when the ideas are just starting to take shape, when the infatuation and excitement are at their peak. But the idea that our own faithfulness, and God’s, is shown through dependable consistency over time? Not just a high of emotion or depth of conviction on any particular day? Just… endurance?

Right when something requires my endurance is usually when I try to check out or change things up. But perhaps if I can see my God’s constancy as what grounds me and provides my stability, it wouldn’t feel as hard to practice my own. In that sense, the practice of stability is where the meaning is found, rather than in something new or different.

Constancy then is the canvas; the medium is up to me. I can follow my inspiration and energy, or lack of it, on any given day, knowing that there are no wrong tools for expression. Paint, charcoals, crayons, or just a pen scribbling all over everything. God meets me there.

This is one of the reasons I love the rich tradition Christianity provides for spiritual disciplines. There are so many we can choose to nurture our faith depending on our sensibility in any given season of life. Would a post exploring spiritual disciplines be helpful? Things like prayer, service, solitude, fasting, silence, fellowship, confession, celebration… there are so many!

Here’s to expressing constancy through showing up, even when things feel stale. What we do when we get there isn’t always the point. It is our being that counts, not our doing. May you have the courage to be wherever you are today and see that humble offering as good, and good enough.

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I wrote this on Friday eve (GASP) because I’m working during my regularly scheduled writing hour this week. Greetings from my desk where I’m drinking Roasterie coffee from a Pitchside mug with a lovely office companion named Bailey.

I wonder when you feel most energized about something? Is it the beginning, middle, end? What keeps you motivated to keep going when things start to feel a little stale? I enjoy hearing from you & would love to know… and maybe steal your ideas.

Until next week,
Janette

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