Home and Habit

My favorite bike path in Paris: Limiting habit or highlight of my day?

While I found De Botton’s chapter, “On Habit,” clever and sharp as always, this time I also disagreed with certain attributions he made. These had to do mainly with the experience of home, and how we all function in our native environments.

De Botton says of home, “We feel assured that we have discovered everything interesting about our neighborhood.” Underlying this is an assumption that we have lived for a considerable time in one place, which represents a key difference between his reality and my own. I have lived in New York, uninterrupted (save this semester), for 2.5 years. In that time, I have moved 5 times. Though my city has remained the same, my immediate surroundings have always been in flux. In some ways, I suppose that has kept me in constant observing and discovery mode, and I have never reached the sort of ennui that De Botton describes in London.

However, I did recognize and relate to the process he describes, by which “our sensitivity is directed towards a number of elements, which we gradually reduce in line with the function we find for the space.” Even though I have never ceased to find new things in my immediate neighborhood, I do notice an almost inevitable focusing of my own routes, my gaze, and my network of stores, cafés, etc. After finding an efficient route to the subway, my favorite place to buy bread, or the most pleasant bike ride, I tend to return to them by rote.

Where I depart from De Botton’s thinking is that, to me, this narrowing is not a negative development. Rather, I have found a sense of pleasure and accomplishment in becoming a bit of a specialist in my neighborhood. To be able to separate out what one likes from what one doesn’t, to know how to access the good things, and to not lose time on the annoying ones (like slow people on the sidewalk)… aren’t these all desirable adaptations? Selective usage of one’s habitat isn’t necessarily a dulling of the senses or a blindness to new discoveries; it can also be one of the joys of acclimating to a new home.

I agree with De Botton that our increased “receptiveness” while traveling is an essential and wonderful aspect of the experience. I would add, though, that that awareness extends beyond the journey, and into the return. I notice when I travel, even just to a neighboring state or borough, that certain features of my home environment stand out as different. For example, I’m always keenly aware of the more open sky and the quiet in Brooklyn when I return from a day in Manhattan. Who knows what details, previously unremarkable, will jump out at me when I return home from Paris?

I don’t think the danger lies in falling into well-loved routines in our own neighborhoods. The risk is more that we don’t venture beyond those surroundings frequently enough, in order to return and see them more clearly. I’m thinking of Santayana’s quote, back when we read “The Philosophy of Travel,” which gets at this exact idea. “Turning… from the familiar to the unfamiliar,” which can be accomplished by even the smallest scale travel, “keeps the mind nimble.”

Location