ATTITUDES, HABITS, AND RELATIONSHIPS — ON “BECOMING”
A friend asked me to write this one. Well, she said, “I have a prompt for you.”
“Ok, I’m game.”
“Becoming.” Then she turned the music back up and kept driving. And that’s all I got: becoming.
Immediately, a ton of low-hanging fruit came to my mind, little cliches like “becoming who we are”, and while those topics are worth talking about, they felt like the easy thing to write about this time. I wanted to push myself a little more.
But if I have to share about becoming right now, I’d like to talk about a few of the things that contribute to who we are becoming. Becoming something, like making a cake, is filled with ingredients. It’s not just one thing, it’s a lot of things that all culminate in this delicious thing called cake. Or in this case, the person we’re forming into. So what, then, are the things that makeup who we’re becoming?
To be candid, what I’m about to write won’t be exhaustive. It won’t cover all the bases. But it’ll at least give us something to digest and bring into our dialogues. Let's talk about three major factors that shape the person we’re becoming every day: our attitudes, habits, and relationships.
When I say attitudes, I mean the general disposition or outlook we carry towards life as it unfolds in front of us. This is not about what we do or experience, this is about how we allow ourselves to think about it. We have to start with our attitudes and outlooks, because otherwise, even if we build a great life, we probably won’t be able to appreciate it.
Building a healthy attitude means looking at your life and seeing that it is a gift, no matter what form it’s taking. To have breath in your lungs is a gift, and it is a message that says “your life has hope.” We must craft attitudes that believe our life has purpose, that we’re not doomed, that setbacks are not “just the way it is.” We must be courageous enough to believe that all of this, all of our joys and agonies, all of our seeming successes and seeming failures have a purpose. They all are full of potential.
Truly, a healthy attitude realizes that everything we experience in life can teach us something, to help us lead lives of meaning, even the things outside our control. A healthy attitude sees everything, every experience, wound, opportunity, or emotion as raw materials with which we can make something. A healthy attitude sees life isn’t good or bad based on what raw materials we’re given, but what we decide to do with them.
Once we’ve accepted our life as it is with gratitude, that this is where we are and what we have to work with, we can build habits. Habits are how we take control of the story. Our habits are how we pick up the pen and start crafting.
Good habits are born out of good goals. What do you want to be true about you and your life, or not true? Do you want to be in great shape, do you want to be well-rested, do you want to learn how to do something you can’t currently do? Habits are how you build that.
In my opinion, a good habit has three facets: how much, how often, and why. We decide how much or little we want to do something, how often we want to accomplish this, and what goal this is serving in our life. Some examples are: “I want to drink 100 ounces of water every day because I want to give my body what it needs to be alert.”; “I want to go 90 minutes a day without my phone because I want to practice being where I am and the skill of boredom.”; “I want to paint for one hour a week because painting gives my mind space to move in a way that language can’t, and it refreshes me better than just about anything.”; “I want to spend one hour a week alone with each of my children because I want to cultivate a loving, long-term relationship with them where they feel safe and listened to.” How much. How often. Why. Habits are how we move our bodies, schedules, and lives into agreement with our values.
These little routine changes and micro-adjustments teach us that our life is not merely a product of fate or chance or the cards we’ve been dealt, but that we can choose what to do with our raw materials. Habits transform us simply in their presence, beyond the measurable results they produce, having habits in the first place builds endurance, resolve, and reinforces the truth that we have agency in this life. I believe the saying about habits that has made its way all over the world and into religion after religion, ideology after ideology, philosophy after philosophy: the things we do do things to us.
This all finds its fuel in our third category: relationships. My dad used to say “you are most influenced by the movies you watch, the music you listen to, and the people with whom you associate yourself.” There’s also this quote that floats around (though I’m not sure whose it is originally) that says “show me your five closest relationships and I’ll tell you who you’re becoming.” There’s a lot of truth in that.
Humans are fantastic at imitation, conforming to a group, assimilating. Because of that, we will subconsciously change our language, tastes, goals, habits, attitudes, and so much else to be similar to the people we surround ourselves with. That gives me a lot of hope because I will be so grateful if I become anything like my three best friends here in Charleston. They’re all men of character, curiosity, security, and hope. They know how to take control of their story, receive the gifts of life with gratitude, listen, and celebrate other people well. But if I surrounded myself with self-centered, pessimistic, greedy, or passive people, I would slowly devolve into a very similar person. Mine wouldn’t be a story of overcoming the seas, it would be a story of resignation to where the wind blew.
At the end of all of this, we have to remember why we’re becoming something in the first place. Why do we journey out of our comfort zones in search of growth? For a lot of us, this feels like a journey of value. We’ve picked up the assumption that people farther down the road are more valuable, more worth their humanity, more justified in their existence. I no longer believe this assumption, most people don’t believe it when they hear it out loud. You are valuable right where you are, worth your existence, and a beautiful part of our world. You don’t have to work to earn that or prove that. You belong here, I promise.
So if it’s not to become valuable, then what’s the point? Why leave the comfort zone? Why strive? Why step into a new story at all? I’m reading Donald Miller’s latest book right now, and his constant reflection on Victor Frankl has led me to a conclusion. While our journey of becoming will not add to our infinite intrinsic value, it will add deep meaning to our lives. The journey of becoming is not about being more worth our existence, it’s about finding purpose in it. It’s about believing you are here for a reason, your story is one of transformation, of growth. It is a story that you will share with the next generation, and they will share with the generation after them, that you believed you had the power to influence your life, you built habits that cultivated that life, and your closest companions were people who were also building that life.
It may be worth you sitting down for a little while and observing your life. What attitudes do you carry about and around your life? What habits are you forming, and do you like them? Who is in your life, and do you hope to become more like them? Start, or continue, to tend to the fires you want to keep. And at the end of all of these, may we have the courage to choose not just a life of events happening to us, but a life of meaning. May we choose a life of becoming.