Hi Everyone,
I hope you’re doing ok.
Week 52! Goal reached!
I know I’ve posted a fair few pictures of our dog Howie but he makes me happy and I hope he makes you happy. He is now 12 (that means I’ve been brushing his teeth for 12 years!). The dog years have flown by. I can remember getting him when he was a puppy. He charged around the garden smelling stuff and wagging his tail a lot. While he doesn’t do super long walks anymore, he still acts like a puppy most of the time, insisting on games or cuddling up on the settee. He sleeps a lot more too. There’s unconcious wisdom in his approach to life. Have more fun, sleep more, enjoy eating, enjoy exercising and love unconditionally. I want to be more like Howie in 2022.
Another thing that Howie does is react to stuff. I don’t think he ever makes a voluntary decision. If he’s uncomfortable, he moves. If he’s hungry, he eats. If he’s playful, he plays. This got me thinking about human behaviour and the system 1 and system 2 thinking described in the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. I’ve a long held theory that we humans don’t actually make decisions in the way we believe we do. That is, we don’t really decide anything. Everything we do is a reaction to something else, be that a short chain of events or triggers, or impossibly long and complex chains. Daniel Kahneman talks about the illusion that our system 2, i.e. what we think of as the self, is in control. This appears to be backed up by lots of stuff that we read about breaking bad habits and forming new ones. If it were as easy as just deciding then no one would ever smoke and we’d all do yoga every day (I wish I would do yoga every day). I tidied up my workshop today. Why? Because it got untidy after clearing our house and muddy after a mountain bike ride. Need more? Well I remembered the pleasure derived from a tidy workshop. More? Well we’d already done the other jobs we’d set ourselves for the weekend. So the case for tidying the garage raised in priority to the point where I simply just got on with it. And what if there was still other things to do, or I’d simply run out of energy? Well I just wouldn’t have done it. I wouldn’t have made a conscious list of the pros and cons. Why am I attempting to write about this? I’ve thought about it for a long time. My Mum was a dog trainer so I observed a lot about changing behaviours (albeit it in dogs). And maybe because of that I’ve a passing interest in how my brain works. And maybe that’s why I read a few books (more reactions). Writing about it is a extension of these things (for me at least). So I reckon that in forming new habits in 2022 I’m going to stop making decisions (and usually failing) and just embrace the fact that my system 1 is more in control of my experience of the world than my system 2. If I accept that then I can focus on training my system 1 in new behaviours rather than making my self do things. If you’re a mountain biker then you’ll know about flow, the free energy that you get from trails if you know how to harness it. One of Csikszentmihalyi’s eight characteristics of Flow is “Effortlessness and ease”. I’m hoping that I can achieve that with new habits this year.
Speaking of “Effortlessness and ease”, me and some pals went riding at Cwmcarn this week. We’d had a really good ride. The climbs were tough but rewarding and the downhills were excellent. We came to the last downhill trail back to the carpark. As we paused for breath at the top I declared that this wasn’t the last run. You never have one last run when mountain biking, it precipitates an accident. One of my pals argued it was the last run before remembering the rule. He set off first, along the forestry access road and off on to the trail through a small gate way. He clipped his handblebar on the gate at speed which turn his wheel sending immediately left off the side of the trail and down a very steep hill side over bushes and bits of fallen trees. The rest of us watched with baited breath, waiting for the moment when he’d go over the bars. I was mentally gearing up to help him untangle from his bike and any passing trees. But nothing of note happened. He casually rolled the bike to a stop about 10 metres further down. His system 1 had kicked in and he was able to control the situation with effortlessness and ease which saved him from a nasty accident. Nice work system 1!
I thought about reading all my weeknotes to help reflect on 2021 but there are 51 of them and I’m a slow (mindful?) reader so I’m not putting myself under pressure to do that for week 52.
And so that’s the end of my year of weeknotes! It’s sometimes been tough to write them and I thought about giving up many times but I’m glad I stuck with it. I’m not going to continue in this format but I’ve got a few ideas that I’m working on so hopefully I’ll be able to continue with this writing habit.
Be excellent to yourselves and each other,
Si
