Redefining habits

It's easy to forget how we ever pick up routines that inhabit our lives, filling them with definitions for our existences.

The interests we have in our lives intrigue our minds enough to evolve our initial curiosity little by little into specialized routines that define us.  In this way, we become "experts", but the process with which it happens is truly fascinating.

(Also, when I say "routines", I mean daily routines that define your occupation, e.g. sitting in front of a computer for a programmer in contrast to hitting the gym for an athlete.  I don't mean "get out of bed and shower rather than brush your teeth first" kind of routines)

The habits, routines, whatever you want to call them, become integrated into our lives initially without any effort at all because they become adhered to by curiosity.  I've seen it many times, felt it just as many, to have whole days and nights become consumed by a chance brush with something fatefully interesting that it proceeds to change the course of a life drastically.

But then, many times, human fallacies, or maybe just personal habits of lesser degree that are more obstructive, tend to spoil that pure, innocent, even giddily fun and enjoyable interest into ambitions that're a little darker, a little less for the interest and a little more for the self.

I am, of course, talking from my own experience.  Writing is one of those things that I started doing purely for the delight.  It was just something that I was somewhat good at, something that brought me great pleasure.  But as I grew, I began to regard it less as a recreational habit and more as a tool-- a tool to gain recognition, respect, even money one day.

But I should know that if I truly believed in my talent as a writer, then all these things will follow only if I hone my skills to the best that they can be, and I can only achieve that if I don't waste any of my mind, time, and ambitions on anything so superficial as where my writing can take me monetarily or in regards to fame.  I wouldn't try to get to a destination by wearing the proper attire, but rather, by building the very vessel that would take me there.

I live in an increasingly abstract world, I know, but I have to come to realize the language that the abstract has with the tangible world.  It's the natural world that grows flowers, but it's the abstract one that calls it beautiful.  So I must harness my natural inclinations and let it be abstractly interpreted as it must be to better my world, to cleanse it-- not by denying, but by redefining.