Small Habits: Meditation, Books, and the Gym

I am not a person of grand routines. I have tried, and they collapse the first time life gets in the way. What has stayed are three small habits, and I keep them more like friendships than disciplines.

Meditation is the shortest. Some mornings it is twenty minutes; some mornings it is two. The point is not the length but the sitting down. I have stopped trying to clear my mind. I just let it be busy, and I sit with it the way you would sit with a restless child.

Reading biographies is my second habit. I love how a single life, told well, can fold an entire era into a few hundred pages. They remind me that everyone interesting was, at some point, uncertain and ordinary. That is oddly freeing.

The gym is the loudest of the three, and the one that makes the other two easier. There is something honest about a heavy weight. It does not care about your week. You either lift it or you do not, and either answer is fine — you simply try again tomorrow.

Together these three are not a productivity system. They are just the small things that keep me feeling like myself.