Habits

My father's three aunts, my great-aunts, were nuns. When he was young, they wore full habits, all in black.

He had trouble telling them apart. "Which one is Aunt Agnes?" he asked his mother.

"The one who laughs," she said.

"But they all laugh."

"The one who laughs loudest."

By the time I came around, the rules had been relaxed and the nuns wore slacks and old-lady cardigans.

Aunt Agnes had retired from schoolteaching and taken up watercolor, but she told me she spent most of each morning in prayer.

She kept a list of those to pray for, she said, and she moved down it each day with a pencil, so that she wouldn't leave anyone out.

I've never worn a religious habit, but I do have a rakusu, the miniature version of the Buddha's robe that you sew before receiving the Buddhist precepts.

I cut and sewed each scrap carefully. I would have this for the rest of my life, and I wanted it to be perfect.

At the end of the week, I realized the whole thing was sewn wrong-side out.

It seems to me habits used to be bad. A smoking habit. A habit of biting one's nails.

But lately, it's as though they're supposed to be our path to salvation. Witness the megabestsellers like Atomic Habits and The Power of Habit. Witness the popularity of habit tracking apps.

Witness the sense that removing our desire and agency will save us.

My first habit tracker app was called HabitBull and I put it on my very first smartphone.

You could enter a whole grid full of habits, and you could select how often you intended to do them. It didn't have to be daily, it could be three times a week, or once a week, and if you did it the right amount, the checked-off bubbles would link together, creating one of those lines you were supposed to be proud of and not want to break.

I filled my habit tracker with ideas of what my Buddhist practice ought to look like. Meditate three times a day, go to temple twice a week, art practice, Buddhist study.

My habit tracker was a repository for my aspirations.

In Zen, we had a koan, The world is vast and wide, why do you put on your robe at the sound of the bell?

My ass was on that cushion every morning, but I never passed that koan.

Even though I'm not a Buddhist anymore, the liturgy comes back to me, resurrected from an unknown ache in my chest.

The end of the pre-dawn sitting, legs asleep, the blessed rustle of the timekeeper's robe as they reach for the bell, finally the end is here. Ding! Ding!

The liturgist begins the chant, and we all join in, weaving our voices and secret wishes together:

Vast is the robe of liberation...

Once, my daily writing ritual, my habit, involved rising before dawn, sipping hot lemon water while the coffee brewed, and lighting candles at no fewer than three altars around my living room.

I'm writing this now while my toddler watches cartoons and my husband plays with the baby.

My toddler's show sings the liturgy of my day:

Daddy finger, daddy finger, where are you? Here I am, here I am, how do you do?

I don't have a habit tracker anymore.

My great aunts, the nuns, are all dead now.

The last time I visited them, they were retired and living in a house for old nuns. They drank a pitcher of whiskey sours and had coasters with cartoon nuns: Sister Mary Margarita, Sister Mary Martini, Sister Mary Mai Tai.

They laughed. Aunt Agnes laughed loudest.

In the morning, I imagine she still rose early, her list of prayers before her.