Creatures of habit?

By Gordon Hawkins

Do we need routines in our nineties? Can't we just take the day as it comes and as the spirit moves us? The answer, as ever is complicated. As we go, almost automatically, through our standard getting-up, going-to-bed, ablutions, dressing, home cleaning, meal preparing and other regular routines, aren't we loading our neural pathways with the same old procedures and, in the process, reducing our ability to respond readily to new ideas, new events, new people?

It seems to be the common view of those who study our aging ways that routines are essential. They give structure to our days; enable us to maintain standards and a sense of community. They allow us to preserve our poise and our self-regard and, in so far as it is possible, our independence.

There are those - usually outside the caring professions - who take a different view. The acerbic Samuel Beckett, for one, believed that habits were "the great deadener." "The devotion of habit," he wrote," paralyzes our attention." Habit, in a word, stifles our imagination.

There is, of course, no reason why we cannot combine old habits and new ideas. I have recently seen an article by a professor of adult education in California who argues, like many in her profession, that, even though we learn slowly, the brain is always capable of building new pathways and we thus have the equipment already in place to deal with something new and interesting. And she doesn't mean learning to do better what we do already, but to do something totally new. She calls it experiencing an "overlay of complexity."

Perhaps a more realistic approach, at least for those of us in the later age brackets, is not to plunge helter-skelter into something totally new, but to keep our habits on auto-pilot and, at the same time, keep our imagination in trim by deliberating spending time observing and reflecting on those new developments, new ideas and new patterns of thought and behaviour which we can follow in the world around us but our outside our daily compass.

And that overlay of complexity sounds too much like the problem I have each time I change my duvet cover.