12 Simple Truths About Daily Habits

Life is a daily enterprise. Life doesn’t happen to us in decades, weeks or years – it happens moment to moment.

Sure, we may look forward or back at periods of our life – our “lost decade” or the “best years” or the “worse weeks”.

But life is only ever happening today.

Today, this very day you are reading this, is the only day we have to truly live – yesterday can be remembered and tomorrow can be dreamed about. But today is the only moment we can ever experience in real-time.

Which makes what we do every day so very important. Here are 12 simple truths about daily habits.

1. What you do today, and every day, matters. Because what you do every day accumulates. It adds up. And in the end your life will be a matter of moments, all added together, to form Your Life.
2. You can change your daily habits at any time.   They aren’t set in stone. You are in the driver’s seat and can change direction and destination at any time you decide to.
3. Your daily habits are like scaffolding, or the architecture, of your life. They are the things that your life hangs on.
4. Whether they are conscious or not, deliberate or not, purposeful or not – your daily habits shape your life, and the experience you have of your life.
5. Mornings are especially important, because they set you up for your day. What kind of day do you want to experience?
6. More on morning habits: If your mornings have a lurching, unstructured, staggering quality, you can change that. You can bring structure and shape to your mornings, as a platform to set yourself up to have a creative and productive day, or any other kind of day you want to have.
7. You can bring shape and structure into every part of your day, if you choose. No part of your life need be excluded from deliberate and purposeful daily habits.
8. End-of-day habits can set you up for a creative or calm evening, and a restful sleep. Consider your end-of-day as a chance to conclude your day any way you choose – perhaps you want a quiet, reflective evening, or perhaps you want a more creative, energetic evening. Or a bit of both. Whatever kind of night you want to have, you can create and maintain it through an end-of-day set of habits.
9. More on evening habits: Consider the place television has in your evening habits. Perhaps it adds something important and valuable to your nights. Or perhaps it’s optional, and you would benefit from having at least one, if not a few, evenings that are television-free.
10. Daily habits help others to fit in with your life, and you with theirs. If you share your life with others in any way – at home, at work, in your neighbourhood or building – then having a set of daily habits can help grease the collective wheels and lubricate your social interactions.
11. It’s up to you which daily habits you include in your life. They may include exercise and moving your body, what you eat and preparing meals, a spiritual or ‘quietness’ practice, reading, writing, some artistic or creative practice. You are limited only by your imagination as to what your daily habits encompass!
12. Having clear, deliberate, purposeful daily habits does not mean you can’t ever be spontaneous or do something just because you feel like it. Spontaneity without some kind of structure is chaos. And it can be very unsettling, even upsetting, for others.

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