Creatures of Habit – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, how we tend to stick to the same things over our lives.

I’m writing this week’s blog post substantially later than I usually do. This past week has been very uncomfortable for me, first with a bout of food poisoning last Tuesday and Wednesday, and now with the continuing aftereffects of it still in my system. So, at a time like this when I feel physically terrible, I often find myself returning to the same old routines and manners that I’ve practiced my entire life. There’s something comforting in watching an old episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy all these years later because it’s nostalgic as well as staying educational.

Last night I found myself craving some good music, the soaring melodies and rich harmonies found in opera. I ended up listening to a couple of things including the Queen of the Night’s second aria “Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen” from Mozart’s Magic Flute. For all the hellfire innate in the words––the title translates to “Hell’s vengeance boils in my heart”––there’s one line near the end that caught my eye, “Alle Bande der Natur.” At the moment I thought of “Bande” as in “bonds” or more metaphorically “customs” when in fact it really means “bonds” as in “connections.” So, in my elementary level German I translated “Alle Bande der Natur” as “all bonded by Nature” or that it was a matter of instinct and habit.

My misinterpretation of the German text there brought me to think a bit more about habit and instinct. What sets us off to do what we do? Why for example do some people eat each thing on their plate in turn rather than mix the flavors together? Or why does my cat like to extend her claws when she’s happily being petted?

Instinct is a survival mechanism. If you recognize you’re in a bad situation, you’ll probably do your best to get out of it. That goes back to the days when our distant ancestors were hunted as prey by other larger animals. Perhaps the urge to laugh at other people’s misery, embodied in my youth by America’s Funniest Home Videos and today by a good portion of the content on Instagram and the “Hold My Beer” subreddit, comes from a similar primal satisfaction that it’s not me who’s getting his leg gnawed off by a lion today.

As long as we’re tuned into our own natures, we’re bound to avoid some of the pitfalls that inspired that particular metaphor and survive. I learned the hard way to avoid bad food this past week and am still suffering the consequences now eight days later. On the other hand, my pup Noel learned in which house her best friend the black lab Henry lived and liked to stop and sit at the bottom of his stairs to see if he’d come out to play. We create habits out of experience and grow as a consequence.So, the moral of the story, the greatest lesson to learn here: to quote the Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man himself, “never run for a public bus, there’ll always be another.”