Travel days
I thought my toughest challenge on a 12-hour travel day would be airport delays. It turned out to be keeping a promise I made to myself years ago.
I’m up early for a flight from Los Angeles to Seattle, that includes a three hour layover in Las Vegas. When I finally land in Washington, I’ll still have a few hours left in my travel day to rent a car and drive across the border to Vancouver, Canada. I’m going to surprise my mom for her 85th birthday. It’s important that I be there even while I feel some pressure from work to get some projects completed while I’m gone. I decide my solitary travel will give me an advantage. Like most knowledge workers, my work is mostly me on my laptop. As an anonymous traveler, my thinking is they’ll be no one to interrupt my productivity on the plane. But my optimism makes me nervous. I have enough failed reps at this sort of thing to know how deceiving an open travel day like this can be.
The gift that comes from being bolted to a seat on a plane is I have nowhere to go. I love how much focus I can bring to whatever is in front of me. It’s immersive. If I’m not careful though, I can focus on the wrong things, leaving me with a deep sense of regret later. My temptation is usually entertainment, and I have plenty of options. From shows to podcasts to live sports to people watching, I can get lost in all of it. Each medium offers a unique invitation to forget my ambitions and burn my time like logs on an open fire.
It’s days like these that I’m deeply grateful to have my practice — a never-miss-a-day set of habits that I’m committed to completing no matter what. When I talk about my practice, I often get the feeling that those I’m sharing it with don’t quite understand how seriously I take it. I’m religious about it. Not to get it perfect. Not to win a prize. There are no points for its completion each day. But when I put my whole heart into it, I get far more in return.
First, my practice wakes me up and gets my whole body involved in my day. Second, it makes me feel confident and strong, offering a deep sense of personal satisfaction in contrast to the regret I feel when I let things drift. Finally, it reminds me that life is hard, orienting me to consider how difficult things might be for those around me. It points me otherward. When I consider the collective and compounding value of my practice, I’m starting to believe it might just be saving my soul.
If I was a pilot, my practice would be akin to a pre-flight check list. If I fail to check everything off the list, I don’t get to fly that day. If I was a computer programmer, my practice would be like an operating system. If my operating system isn’t running, it means none of my apps will work. If I were a monk, my practice would be my ‘rule of life.’ Not practicing my rule means I’m disqualifying myself from the life I say I want.
Sometimes when I’m fighting for my practice, I actually feel like a monk. Or, at least what I imagine one might feel like. Picture a monk (or a nun) walking through an airport in their habit. Those religious uniforms that make it unmistakable who they are and what they’re about. They stand out. Some might say they even look a bit weird compared to most everyone around them. I have to believe they must at least feel out of place. My habit practice may not be as recognizable as theirs, but I definitely feel weird, especially when I’m the only one practicing it.
Currently, my practice consists of the following: I’ve banned my phone from my bed permanently. I sleep at least seven hours per night. I drink 96 ozs of water per day. I pray and read scripture for at least 20 minutes per day. I go through a breathing protocal that allows me to hold my breath for at least two minutes. I work out for an hour. I journal at least a full page. I take a shower in the coldest water I can find.
There are other rhythms to my practice, too: My kitchen stays closed for at least sixteen hours a day and open for just eight. Every three months, I ratchet my practice just a bit by adding four weeks in a row of no alcohol or desserts. This guarantees that I have four months a year of complete abstinence from both, while avoiding processed food. Every quarter, I also revise my practice and run any changes by a group of trusted friends who also maintain a practice of their own. Except for a weekly day of rest from my physical workouts and cold showers, I rarely miss a day. I’ve kept my practice every day for the past eight years.
This all might seem like a lot at first glance but that’s only in contrast to what normal, non-weirdo’s, do. It’s just decent sleep, hydration, clean eating, good hygiene, and consistent movement… nothing much more than a broad snapshot of good daily life habits. There’s nothing herculean about my list. Most anyone could do at least some modified version of it on a daily bases. There’s also nothing special about it. I’m not trying to optimize anything or hit some new PR, even though my doctor tells me that these habits likely will have a materially positive impact on my life span and health span. But these are just side benefits. The primary motivation is about something else. Something far more human.
The key is to notice the common denominator of each habit that constitutes my practice… and here it is: On most days, I don’t want to do any of them because they’re uncomfortable. Volunteering to do the thing I don’t want to do is what’s required to add a habit into my practice.
What I actually want to do when I’m tired is to lay in my bed and scroll social media. Often, if I don’t feel like going to bed, it feels like a rigid discipline to shut things down. Drinking water is a pain, especially if I have to keep going to the restroom all day long. I often am grateful after I pray and read Scripture, but rarely before I get started. The same is true with the euphoric feeling I have after I hold my breath and almost never before. Everyone knows that the hardest part of a workout is getting started. The same with journaling, and don’t even get me started about how cold showers never stop feeling cold no matter how often you do them. I have enough pride and arrogance to know that if I feel like I want to eat something or drink something at whatever time of day, I can justify it. Processed food is always the easiest to grab. It’s just so convenient. Then, the idea of talking with others about my habit life is about as vulnerable as I can imagine. It’s so uncomfortable to put myself on the hook and account for what I’ve done (or didn’t do) in front of my friends.
But there has never been a day where I’ve done what I’ve told myself I was going to do, especially when I didn’t feel like it, and didn’t feel great about it after. Volunteering for discomfort is magic. That’s why I make discomfort the table stakes for a habit to make my list. If it makes me stronger and more awake on the other side, and I don’t want to do it, it qualifies. But doesn’t strong and awake sound like a way more gratifying way to live than week and asleep?
It’s worth noting that my list didn’t start out the way it looks now. It actually began with just one habit. Almost fifteen years ago, I noticed how irritated I felt when I would show up at the dentist with freshly flossed (and bloody) teeth, pretending I had good mouth hygiene. James Clear, the modern authority on habits, had just started blogging. He was still years away from publishing his worldwide, perennial best-selling book, Atomic Habits. It was his blog that introduced me to his habit stacking technique.
If you’re unfamiliar, habit stacking is a technique you can use when you want to add a habit that you’re currently resisting in your daily life. The process is simple: Commit to not doing a habit you already do everyday, that you like, until you’ve completed the new habit that you are resisting. For me, the habit I didn’t resist was relieving my bladder when I woke up in the morning. I decided that I wouldn’t let myself go to the bathroom until I had flossed my teeth first. I immediately discovered my motivation and I haven’t missed a day of flossing since.
It would be too simplistic to suggest that habit stacking is the singular unlock for what it takes to build a practice. But it did give me an opening. After absorbing more of James’ ideas, along with other thoughtful writers on habit including Gretchen Rubin and Charles Duhigg, and long-dead writers like William James and Aristotle, I began to realize how I might design my life in the direction of more good habits and less bad ones.
Next, I added habit sequencing to my habit stacking. My list of good habits I wanted began to grow as my list of bad habits I wanted to remove started falling off more consistently. Taking more good advice, I began manipulating my environment to make adopting good habits (or eradicating bad ones) easier.
But what I discovered pretty quickly is that the human condition brought with it some unique and universal complexities that made it exceedingly challenging to consistently translate good habits into a good life.
First of all, there’s no end to the list of ambitious habits I could add. When I was getting started I dreamt of the perfect list, properly sequenced, that would yield an optimum existence. What I got instead was a list of commitments to myself that I commonly broke out of boredom, exhaustion, weak character, or whatever more important thing got in the way.
Second, routines really only work for me when I could control all the variables. My routine would routinely fall apart simply because of circumstances outside of my control. Bad weather would throw off my mood and my plans to go for a run. An upset client or boss forced me into a position of choosing between my routine and risking my livelihood. And don’t even get me started about how my kids threw off my good intentions. I needed something more resilient than a routine. Something less fragile and more foundational.
I didn’t know it at the time but what I needed was a practice.
Days like today, on this trip to visit my mom, test whether I have a routine or a practice. I have all the excuses in the world to skip on my commitments. I’m vising my 85 year old mom on her birthday for goodness sakes.
But imagine the benefit that comes from not missing on days when I can justify skipping. Consider the sense of agency I experience when I anticipate difficulty and learn how to get in front of it. Travel days don’t have to be an interruption. The non-practitioner might assert that flights and layovers and parking and driving and borders and delays are all obvious examples of unavoidable interruptions. But the actual practitioner isn’t surprised by these threats to their practice. They anticipate them.
Let’s go one more step… What if I saw every day as a travel day? Imagine you’re at home with great plans for what you will accomplish today. You’re not so foolish to think everything will go smoothly, do you? No. You may not know which particular interruption is coming your way but you do know that trouble is coming. What if you decided to turn the table on trouble. Imagine trouble getting scared that you are coming for it.
One final note: Practices don’t create themselves. Practitioners do. Everyone has some sort of pattern they do life by but most people are unconscious to it and are certainly not intentional with it. A practice is implicitly something we are awake to and consciously choosing every single day. It would be silly to say that someone has a writing practice if they didn’t write every day. The same would be said for a physician or a lawyer or a mechanic who doesn’t practice medicine or law or machinery every day. A practice is something that you see on display. True practitioners don’t stop practicing when circumstances go in unpredictable directions. Practioners practice knowing that life is unpredictable. They ready themselves for anything.
It’s tempting to think that me committing to my practice, while I go through the slog of travel, while maintaining my commitments are the hard parts of this trip. Not even close. It’s my mom’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis that will test my practice the most. I practice my practice, every day, so that I’m ready to show up on day’s like this for my mom. If writers write, and singers sing, I practice resilience to be resilient. I practice doing hard things to up my chances of being the kind of son my mom needs me to be, even if she can’t always remember my name.
Yes, a practice promotes great habits that will help you stand up in all sorts of storms. But the best part is about your practice is what it whispers in your ear, reminding you precisely who you are, and who you are becoming.