While I was chatting this evening with my CASA supervisor, she was struck by the way I remembered her patterns of behavior that after we have met to chat about my case, that I remembered her Wednesday night Buddhist study session at 7:30PM that she always makes it home just in time for after we eat a bit and talk. I commented that I am a creature of habit and that the ruts of life run deep. This is certainly true for me, to the extent that even those times where I seek to explore new places or engage in reading to expand my knowledge or build on interests, that too is something that I make a deliberate habit of. I am not a particularly spontaneous person and I tend to prefer being able to keep enduring habits wherever possible, though it is not always sensible to do so because places are just too far from the paths where I trod on a regular basis.

One of the more interesting aspects of life is that it does not take too much of a bias in favor of one area over another before a rut is made. I remember in the sixth grade, when I was first becoming familiar with earth science that my gifted science and math teacher brought some metal basins in which soil was placed and the basins were tipped at an angle and a water hose was turned on to simulate the path of a river, noting that depending on different factors like the angle of the soil and water that different features could be made simply by the way that the water moved the soil around and that subtle changes in the relationship between the water and the soil could make the course of the water vary, creating oxbow lakes and eroding soil here and placing it there. Similarly, there is a tradition that one makes roads by walking, in that many paths and sidewalks around the world have been formed by the habit of people walking along those paths, thus carving them out of the wilderness, as people turned a slight initial bias towards certain routes into more enduring roads.

Among the notable qualities of mankind is that we are habit-forming creatures. This ought not to be surprising. When we look around at the other creatures around us, we find that they tend to be programmed with instincts that allow them to act immensely efficiently. It takes a lot time, effort, and energy to think and ponder and reflect. It is far more efficient to simply do what one has done, to create enduring habits. Those habits are not always good, but their goodness is somewhat irrelevant. Once we have built ruts, they are immensely difficult to avoid falling into simply because it is so effortless to follow them. Avoiding such ruts requires a great deal of conscious effort, which is costly and difficult and often uncomfortable. It therefore is of the utmost importance that the ruts we create are not bad ones, because once we build habits it is hard to entirely escape their influence, something that appears to be hard-wired into us as we seek to make as much of our life as effortless and efficient as possible and save slower and more costly rational thinking for those moments when we are not dealing with something that we can more or less automate.

We may therefore differentiate between two very distinct types of human intelligence. On the one side, we have the intelligence of the engineer, who seeks to improve efficiency by making things automatic, whether it is through turning people into machines in work processes that deskill others and seek to make them interchangeable parts, often replaceable by machinery when their wages get too high. On the other side, we have the intelligence of the philosopher which seeks to put conscious thought on that which is often automatic, to turn our habits into a subject of inquiry and reflection rather than a mechanical reflex. As a person, I tend to have both the habits of the engineer and the philosopher within me, seeking to turn that which is beneficial into a reflex so that one does not have to think about it, just do it, while also reflecting on habits and everything else to ensure that these habits and reflexes are good ones, because they may not be so. Let us hope we can all cultivate such a balanced perspective given our human tendency to form habits and stick to them more or less tenaciously.