Habits and Improv
How rituals and recalcitrance can satisfyingly end a day
Satisfying pop
mesmerising black circle
the day slowly ends.
- in music
Daily habits have been a distant aspiration of mine since I started getting successful. The slightest implication of causality between a positive event and some activity and immediately I’m tempted into the realms of lifestyle design.
But the fact seems to be that success follows simply from doing the work. Keep doing it and, assuming we’re not talking about vices here, good things are given an opportunity to follow. It’s an attitude that slightly calls foul on my library’s creaking collection of self-help books but, when I’m being honest with myself, the truth is that no amount of snazzy techniques are going to make the real difference. If you want to lost weight, eat more carefully and move more. If you want to write, write. If you want to fall in love, fall in love and accept the consequences of beautiful vulnerability. There’s not much dodging the cost if you want the reward.
This means my days are usually made up of sitting, walking, writing, listening and, sometimes, coding (I’m a techie at my core, feel free to judge me all you like. I do). Activities that seem to resist any impressed schedule, other than giving them the time to do what they please and produce something good when they want to. The art life is populated with peaks of exaltation preceded consistently by troughs of utter self-doubt and furious, pressured seeking. You have to love this work to do it, otherwise it’s just madness.
My days are not, however, complete chaos. There are some gates in place to establish boundaries on the dreaming. One of those I am enjoying right this very instant. It is only my second daily ritual, after an early morning walk, which I resisted on humanitarian and elective lethargy reasons for 47 years but have recently discovered is frustratingly beautiful. It is a habit that bookmarks my day. It turns the page, resets the clock, flips me from daytime focus to evening relaxation. It is the ceremony of listening to an album on vinyl.
Slowly I rise from my chair, taking time to notice the sun on the rug and, inevitably, heating up my dog to panting levels. A short step across the room and I find myself at the turntable, lifting the arm and setting the needle on a random choice from my shelves of carefully curated, and ridiculously ostentatious in this age of digital music, albums.
With needle starting its journey I light the incense, check the tea is still hot, and settle back into probably the chair I originally departed from. Rare is it that I make a return journey because the music isn’t quite right. Most often I sit, do absolutely nothing else, just listen and enjoy the work of someone else for once.
There’s magic in listening to music created, crafted and compiled into the constraints of a vinyl disk. The ordered comes with importance, and the demands on your time are light. You just get to sit, offload the day into the dust in the sunlight (or deep breaths while listening to the rain, depending on how British weather is treating you), and enjoy the perfect excuse to do nothing for around 20 minutes. Until the needle bounces on the inner surface of the disk, and you’re called to think about what the evening ahead might extend you.
I protect very little of my day, but these moments are sacrosanct. For the period of one side of a vinyl album, there are no pings, chirps, or other electronic nuisances. It’s just the music, the tea, and the present moment. What great company they are to sit with.
