I confess to being seriously delighted with Tony Robbins, the self-help guru. I remember decades ago, when he first hit the speaking circuit, I couldn’t stand him.

Then he, and I, grew up. He also became psychologically savvy – not just a self-help wannabe, and I found his 21^st century paradigms of human relationships compelling and spot on.

So I was a little bit

Habits are very Zen in nature, as they arise from an activity that is practiced until it flows through our lives without a hitch. And without distracting us from whatever comes next. In that sense, Zen and habits are well aligned.

And like Zen, habits are also rituals—rituals of persistence. They offer you a practice in small doses until the persistence of the practice itself becomes a habit.

The caution is that habits turn into meaningless rituals when the original need has shifted, or is gone, but we just keep dialing the same “out of order” number anyway.

Or, a habit can be a smokescreen seducing us with the comfort of familiarity when something

We humans are creatures of habit.

From the time we wake up until we go to sleep (and even sleep!), the majority of our behavior has been created from repeating a pattern so many times it becomes habitual.

The good news is this saves us a lot of time. We don’t have to reinvent how to brush our teeth or tie our shoes (do shoes even have laces anymore??).

You might say it’s the brain’s equivalent to how our hearts beat, our lungs breath, and our teeth chew. A part of us is on autopilot, and thank goodness because

You’ve known me to disappear from this blog before, yes? Which, considering I am a writer, is pretty darn odd.

I love to write. I don’t like blogging. Something wasn’t copesetic in Kansas.

And because this has been going on ever since I put this blog up, I knew browbeating myself wasn’t going to work.

So, what was? What was going to turn the tide? Pizza or Chinese?