Habits

The Benedictine habit

Getting into the habit: its original meaning was to put on a monk's habit; in other words, to retreat into the cloister. If you think of the Benedictine round, six masses a day, every day of the week at the same times, then it is not difficult to see the association between becoming a monk and giving yourself over to a very controlled, regulated pattern - habitual behaviour, as we now call it.

I believe habits to be an important component of our makeup. (Being by nature very absent-minded, this is probably more true for me than for the average person.) A very large part of our daily activities is governed by habit: from getting up in the morning and getting dressed to travelling to work and preparing meals, it is all done on automatic pilot, we do not have to think about it, and so we have energy to spare for other things. You notice this best when the normal routine is disrupted: the first few days camping, for instance, I always have to think much more than I like about making coffee and preparing breakfast: in which order do you carry out the steps, where do you put things? After a few days this has become standard procedure again (a recipe, if you like) and I am back into the habit.

Endless variation

The same happened, on a larger scale, when I moved here to York. I have had to discover everything: where to shop, the best route to work, how to divide my time, what to do in the evenings and weekends. I feel I have succeeded pretty well in this, but the unavoidable effect is that all of it is becoming a habit. (Yesterday I called it repetition, and I wrote that it was no fun to write about that: well, here I am, writing about it!) Now that I have found a satisfying number of ways to get a decent warm meal, why go on trying new ones? Knowing a good cinema, why continue looking around for others?

Well, my Yorkish set of habits dictated that today was game play day, and so it was off to the Bar Convent, after the habitual once-over of my apartment. No FPM on Saturday, thank you! A nice aspect of board games is that there is endless variation even within a single game (at least within the better ones), and obviously this expands when you play six or seven different games one after the other, more than half of them never played before. Diversity within repetition: my kind of activity!

Walking down the gardens in Versailles

No true revelations in the new games I tried out today, but several are worth mentioning. Coup is a variation on Love Letter, with role cards that interact with one another in intricate ways, but as it plays in renaissance Italy, lying about what cards you hold (and hoping not te be caught out) is part of the rules of this game. In  Sanssouci, we had to build Louis XIV's gardens and take a walk in them; if you know Alhambra then the theme should sound very familiar though the game is different enough. Canterbury was a bit more involved, this time we had to develop the town by that name, through providing commodities from water and food up the scale to treasure and culture - again, elements that you encounter in many other games but original enough in its mechanisms. Paul, the guy who introduced and explained this one, was very proud because his name is on the box: he helped fund the development of this game through a Kickstarter project. I find the idea of crowdfunding quite pleasing, and I agree that it is a thing to be proud of when it works out. Willem-Jan has also donated some money (in the order of 25 Euro I believe) to one such game-development project.

On the negative side of today's schedule, I have to confess that I reneged on the promise I made to myself to check out parkrun - if you remember, a weekly 5km run around the Knavesmire horse race track here in York. I have registered online and printed the barcode that you apparently need to participate, but left it at work. That's a very poor excuse though, I might as well have gone out 10 minutes earlier this morning to pick it up from there. When looking up the word "habit" on the all-knowing Internet (yes, I do my homework like everybody else!) the first few hits I got were about "making running a habit" and mentioned cue/routine/reward cycles. In those terms, I am not yet a habitual runner (though I do not object to being called a geek by my dear brother). Fortunately I am also not yet a habitual reneger, and tomorrow I do intend to make the rounds once more.