Letter #169: Klavan Jr.'s Key to Happiness

Habit and Anti-Habit.

Klavan Sr.,

Here’s something I’ve noticed. Call it Klavan Jr.’s key to happiness: Some things are only good once they become habits, and some things are only good if they don’t become habits.

You can go to the gym one time in a year and feel very virtuous, but it’s not going to accomplish much of anything unless you make it a daily practice. Once you do, you’ll notice not only that results start to accumulate, but also that the experience itself starts to transform from a misery to a joy. Exercises that felt like pure torment will start to become highlights of your week. You might positively look forward to “leg day.” It’s very disturbing!

But now take alcohol. I love a good Islay whisky. Trinidad cigars, too. Yet the pleasure of them is all in the rare occasion, the break from routine. If you get to a point where the impulse to reach for them becomes commonplace, you’re at the edge of deadly territory. When you start to rely on them at certain times of the day or week, you’re at the borderland of addiction’s dark terrain, where the pleasure gets less with every step and the need greater. Better to keep it occasional.

Habit and rarity, the matter and anti-matter of a good life: perfectly balanced, as our friend Thanos would say.

It occurs to me that this pattern repeats itself on a larger, social scale in the relationship between the individual believer and the church. The rituals of liturgy are nothing if not sacred habits, and their effect on the soul is cumulative. The words of the ancient prayers work best when grafted close to the heart, so that in a sudden moment of need they occur unbidden like a new vine growing from the tree of your own thoughts.

But against the patient drumbeat of that solemn sameness, the centuries of rhythm and routine, a newborn soul stands out like the strain of a melody. Its strangeness is from a far country and its cadence has never been heard yet in all the ages of the earth. Each soul is a minority of one, which is why it’s a disaster when the church tries to re-pattern its laws after every oddball twitch and tick. But the ticks and twitches are part of our humanity, and mercy is in loving them.

Which seems relevant now that we’re in the bleak midwinter season of Advent, when all nature remembers holding its breath for a world-historical interruption of its routine. On a cosmic level, what we call “nature” is analogous to what we call habit on the human level—that's why we say habits are “second nature.” And at one moment long ago the habits of all the universe were suspended. The great grinding wheels within wheels stopped for just a moment to open up a fraction of space within the span of a few molecules, of one womb. And in that space was life, the light of all mankind.

Love,
Spencer