Fundamentals of Well-Being

Habits, Routines, and Rituals Rather than looking at human life as a set of functioning bodily organs, a different way to interpret the components of our organizational pattern is to think in terms of our daily experiences. For example, our habits and routines support each other and help us navigate the events we encounter. Our morning coffee, a bedtime snuggle, or a walk with a friend can be pivotal to how the day goes. If we can’t follow our normal routine we may feel out of sorts all day. Each activity or sequence supports other activities. We rise in time for coffee. Like clockwork, we communicate with our friend about plans to walk. We organize our days so that the things we value can happen. Consequently, what we do with our time supports our health and well-being. Betty Risteen Hasselkus subscribes to the idea that habits are generally thought of as automatic things people do or say repeatedly, whereas routines are driven by outcome. Routines may include a sequence of habits that are related in function. For example, people who value a healthy body might develop a routine of cooking from scratch or of walking instead of driving. As another example, people who desire to spend time with a certain group of friends may develop a routine of going to certain gathering places and engaging in activities of shared interest. Hasselkus argues that rituals may be routines also, but that the significance of outcome for a ritual has a spiritual quality. She gives the example of caring for an ill or elderly loved one in a certain way that is protective of their health and well-being. Hygiene and mealtime care are mentioned, but we can see that the meaning of dignity and well-being, when applied to the mundane aspect of hygiene or mealtime experience, creates a different kind of satisfaction that can be interpreted as having a spiritual quality. For some, daily exercise that appears to be a mundane physical event is actually a time to free the mind for reflection, spiritual contemplation, or for deepening a social connection to a spiritual level. How we organize our time, what habits and routines we employ, and how we reorganize ourselves when something goes awry are critical to how well we can carry out the roles we’ve agreed to play in our family and community, and to our degree of satisfaction. Perhaps more importantly, according to Capra and Luisi, when a self-organizing pattern is compromised and cannot be recovered, health will fail and death will follow. This means that our ability to maintain a self-organizing pattern determines, subtly or palpably, how long we will live. Applications of cybernetic patterns to neural and other bodily functions are clearly grounded in traditional Newtonian and Cartesian scientific principles and application of cybernetics to our use of time is similarly easy. However, there are other ways to interpret the components of a human life and there is another way to define the lines of communication between the components that make up a human’s self-organizing pattern. As noted by Capra and Luisi, Wiener’s ideas led Gregory Bateson to see the mind as a system of information and feedback loops that connects it with the human body. This bridges the Cartesian divide between mind and body. We shall see in later chapters that David Bohm also bridges body and mind, but from a quantum physics perspective. How does this play out in human experience? Hasselkus tells us that habits, routines, and rituals provide a plan for proceeding through our days and weeks that ensures the comfort of familiarity and give us a role to play in our community. She reminds us that holding to these patterns, rather than burdening us with obligation, can free us to think creatively or to ponder our unique identity as it relates to the situation at hand. This kind of multidimensional approach to activities—doing the habits or routines or rituals while contemplating one’s identity or role in the larger picture—sets up a kind of wholeness that can be more satisfying than simply carrying out a task. The deeper meanings of our actions can be brought to the fore in this kind of contemplation and these meanings become the communicative connectors between our physical, social, mental, and spiritual dimensions. The doing typically involves the physical dimension of activity and the contemplation of identity generally involves thinking. Together, our patterns of thinking and doing contribute to our identity, and our identity determines how we show up and participate in the world. Identity Two fairy tales, “Cinderella” and “Jack and the Beanstalk,” respectively illustrate the lack of a self-organizing pattern and a successful self-organizing pattern. These stories also make clear that what people (or story characters) do is critical to our understanding of their identity. In the traditional Cinderella story, Cinderella decides very little in terms of how her day goes. Her step-family’s demands take precedence over any wish she might have regarding how she spends her time. When her wish to go to the royal ball is laughed at she immediately stops pursuing the idea of going. She presumably has numerous home-making skills, including enough skill to help her stepsisters with their gowns for the ball, but there are zero hints that she ever considers applying those skills to help herself. She takes at face value the edict that she cannot go, and has little vision for herself beyond that. Her response is to dissolve into tears until a source outside herself, the fairy godmother, comes to rescue her and takes over the role of dressmaking that Cinderella could actually have participated in with some competence. When she gets to the ball, she again fails to organize herself by not keeping track of the time, and yet again when she loses her shoe on her way out of the palace. One has to wonder how efficient or effective she could have been with a crown on her head.