What pattern are you stuck in? Are you happy with it?
I learned from doing a podcast interview that:
- I have cultivated a massive tendency to ‘openness’ to information and perspectives — because I know I can get set in my ways (and now I’m set in my ways of being open)
- that I use a set of externalised commitment devices to keep myself consistent and persistent, even though I feel myself to be pretty flaky at times
- that have people around me and make public statements and commitments to make myself ethical, partly because I know I can be well dodgy if I’m not careful!
(I also learned that I think out loud, in conversation — though I guess I knew that already)
In other words, I’ve trapped myself in a box that I rather like — a box of learning and listening and trying to be decent.
This box will give me blindsides, of course — times when I’m not ethical or open, which I really can’t see because my behaviour still fits, somehow, with the people I have around me.
But, over time, we build up an identity, a belief that ‘I’m like this’, and often this is as much scaffolding around us as it is something internal.
So it was amusing to see this come up in my timeline about a man who is so committed to routine and his farm and the land that he’s had the same meal every day for ten years.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/apr/16/experience-ive-had-the-same-supper-for-10-years
