Healing Habits
The first year of marriage, one of the most repeated conversations between my husband and me was:
“Why do you do that that way?”
“I don’t know, I guess because my mom did it that way.”
From driving to brushing teeth to making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, our lives were enveloped in habits we didn’t even know to question. It was just the way we had always done it.
Human beings like routines and traditions. Habits are comforting, one less thing to make a decision about.
Maybe that is why Toby in The Year of the Flood continues habits she learned from the Gardeners, despite not fully believing their teachings. Every day at the AnooYoo Spa, after the flood, Toby uses notepaper and “at the top of each fresh page she prints the Gardener Feast Day or Saint’s Day. She can still recite the entire list off by heart” (163).
This seems a bit odd, given that Toby was essentially tricked into becoming an Eve, never fully being a Gardener in her own mind. Maybe the same way a friend of mine stress cleans, or I need my week carefully planned out, Toby needs the routine of naming each day to give her a sense of control in the midst of the end of the world.
The quick-killing virus caused a lot of change in a short amount of time for Toby, so the familiarity of writing down the saint of the day is probably appealing. It provides something that doesn’t change.
In addition, the routine might have been keeping her alive. An article on The Conversation says that decision-making tires people out. Toby’s energy was being conserved by her routine.
Routine for Toby didn’t just start after she left the Gardeners. Her continuing on Pilar’s tradition of speaking to the bees is also a kind of routine that could hold comfort and remembrance of her friend.
On a larger, everyday scale, NPR points out that “nothing could be taken for granted” without habits. Every action throughout the day would have to be thought about, slowing everything down and leading to immense decision fatigue. Humans are certainly good at finding ways to survive and cope, even if that just means doing the same things daily.
A takeaway from this concept is that during stressful times in life (including during a pandemic), having some sort of routine everyday could help reduce tiredness. For me, part of that means eating breakfast every morning, having tea after lunch, and planning a cleaning schedule for my home.
What are your routines? What are new ones you could begin to help reduce decision-making in your day?
Comments