It has been said…

“The patterns in our lives reveal us. Our habits measure us.”

We are “strange loops” cycling back around, pattern after pattern. When I look back on my life thus far, I see a myriad of patterns… some I am proud of and others I am not.  

It is curious (and too often disheartening) how automatic our responses are to various stimuli.  Those who know us best can with unnerving accuracy “play our part” and predict how we will react to this event or that circumstance.  We never have to worry too much about showing those around us who we are… we do it every day through our patterns and our reactions.  Our interests (or lack of interest) is shown in what we make time for, what we do, day-after-day, we weave a pattern, a self-portrait, and then we are surprised when someone reads it so well and holds a mirror to the patterns we have drawn for ourselves, of ourselves.

Fortunately, our past does not have to define us.  We can change that which needs changing and reinforce that which will make us a port of calm and refuge for ourselves and those we love.  This will be the most difficult thing we will ever do.  Change is always hard, but change-of-self, breaking a pattern and creating another, is EXTREMELY difficult.

I might argue that the patterns we weave, started long before we were mature or self-introspective enough to make well thought out decisions about those actions.  The family we were born in to, whether you were the oldest, middle, or youngest child, whether you won the lottery and were born into a zip code that provided opportunity and wealth, or scarcity and poverty… all of these things influence our early pattern making.  It is here that the last part of the quote above becomes so important.  The patterns in our life reveal who we are but it is our habits that measure us.  

As is often the case with a good quote, there is a bit of word-play, going on here… our patterns are our habits, so why the distinction?  

The word “patterns” seem to denote that which is automatic, unplanned, a natural state, however; the word “habit” seems to be colored with a sense of choice.  We choose our habits.  This is why I love this quote… it speaks with truth to the past (all of which we can not now change and some of it things we never had any control over to begin with) and it speaks with truth to the NOW and the future, which we make with the habits we choose.  

We our not measured by what we are given, we are measured by what we make of what we are given, the habits we grow and the habits we kill.  

Our life is a garden for which we had no “say” in its placement or its early plantings.  In time though, this garden becomes ours to weed, ours to plant.  The rows of our garden may reveal our early self but the habits we plant to fill those rows will measure us.  Let us plant wisely.