Dear XYZ,

I messed up yesterday. Got a bit impatient at C for asking me the same question multiple times over the course of several days. Really wasn’t being very considerate or kind, especially to a pregnant person with all sorts of biological changes that she’s going through. I apologized, but I wanted to reflect further on it because I think any type of real change requires a sort of mental or behavioral circuit breaking.

Habit breaking is difficult because it requires us to change our norm. It’s easy to stick with the status quo because there’s already some kind of grain direction that is our natural state. A simple example of this, especially when I was in my grade-school years, is having to write the date on paper assignments. The new year would come around, but it’ll take me a few weeks, maybe even a month, to correct my muscle memory of writing the previous year.

And so breaking out of a habit, or for that matter, going against the grain for anything, for instance cultural or social norms, require some discomfort or additional energy or attention.

Over the next week or so, I’m going to slow down and turn on a “monitor mode” whenever I have any interactions with X. She deserves better, and our son, who will be born in about a month, deserves that too.

I’ve developed a mantra when I find myself getting into a frustrated state — “slow, chill, center”. To remind myself that I am apart from the immediate emotions I’m feeling, so that I can take a quasi-third-person perspective and consider how I actually want to respond. I think this can also be turned into a breathing exercise, the first two words on the breath in, and the last word on the breath out.

Habits take a while to fix. In my poor memory I recall some fact about 7 weeks for habit forming. I expect to report back on how I’m doing here to you, just so that there’s some account there to keep track of.

This also made me think about the Confucian saying, “修身，齐家，治国，平天下。” The way that I interpret this is that change needs to start within us, and emanate outward. We have to cultivate ourselves to make our families and the wider world better.

Unrelatedly, I also thought about how, ultimately, the people that we impact the most are the ones that are closest to us: family, friends. It’s ironic that, it’s often these people that we end up hurting the most. For all that public success brings you, I’m not sure if any of it can ever equate to the private satisfactions of good relationships that are built over decades. At least for me personally, I think that’s one of the real measures of how someone lives their life.

I’ll do better.

xoxo,
K