ON THAT NOTE
Suresh Menon is a writer based in India. In his youth he set out to change the world but later decided to leave it as it is
Our columnist Suresh Menon would like to remain a creature of habit all for the greater good, he says.
Iam a creature of habit. I walk into a coffee shop and the waiter brings me my cup exactly the way I want it, not warmer, not sweeter, not differently coloured. When I walk into a restaurant, and sit at the same table I have been sitting at for years, the head waiter doesn’t bother to get me a menu card. He knows what I want; I don’t even have to give him a significant look or make that gesture cops do in the movies which involves the chin, shoulder and eyebrows.
I walk into a bookstore and books of the kind I like to read mysteriously appear before me carried by a smiling salesman. I occasionally plan to buy something I am never going to read just to wipe that smug smile off his face, but at the last moment my habit catches up with me.
The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken, said Samuel Johnson. And if you didn’t like that quote, you could read this one by Warren Buffet: “The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.” I don’t think Johnson and Buffet moved in the same circles or met at the opera to exchange thoughts, yet both have been credited with saying the same thing on the Internet. But I digress.
Habits are habit-forming, and if you are not careful you land up doing the same things in the same places over and over. Likewise if you are careful. You can get rid of some habits with a conscious effort. To give up biting nails, ordering the same meal, touching wood (you know what I mean) might require less effort than say, renouncing smoking or shooting people. Lifestyle magazines are full of advice on how to give up this or that obnoxious habit. One way to do this is to replace it with another one.
Thus smokers are advised to chew betel leaves, and when that becomes an addiction (for after all, what is a habit but an addiction as Buffet might have said if Johnson had said it first), to bite finger nails instead, and when that becomes a drag, to end sentences with prepositions, and when that causes comment, to overeat, and when that becomes unbearable, to take up smoking.
If I break my habit of sitting at the same table and ordering the same food, the waiter will have to break his habit of serving me too. Not fair. One has to be considerate. I shall therefore remain a creature of habit, occasionally using a preposition to end a sentence with.