HABITS THAT HONED MY PERSONALITY!
Atomic Habits Quotes - Fun With Mama
Even now I hear my grandmother's voice in my ear when I wake up in the morning and get out of bed. "Remember to make your bed after you get up! It clears your mind and your physical space." Those words created a habit in me which I would never leave behind. Even now, when I see a messy bed, with tangled sheets, askew pillows and a crumpled counterpane, my fingers itch to set them right. I love hotels where the bedsheets are pulled tight with nary a wrinkle, sometimes with white towels folded intricately into swans, rabbits and hearts.
Vecteezy
The other habit I picked up was after I got married. Till
the day I tied the knot, the kitchen at home was out of bounds. We had a
loveable martinet, Parvathy Amma, who guarded her spices more vigilantly than
her chunky gold earrings. (I say so because she dropped one of the latter into
the commode by mistake, and was none the worse for it!) Three young girls in
the house, and yet, not one of us knew how to even boil water because the
aforesaid martinet was protective to a fault about us, God bless her soul!
After marriage, the first thing I learnt, along with
switching on the gas stove and boiling water was cleaning the kitchen. My
mother-in-love would do it so assiduously that I watched and learnt! Even
today, after four decades of wedlock, the last thing I do is wipe the kitchen
surfaces with a moist cloth so that Mr. Cockroach and his extended family do
not have a paradise to flourish in.
Life does have its ups and downs. When I am unusually
upset or unhappy about something, my biggest salvation comes from ironing
clothes. Marie Kondo has always been an inspiration, and her instructions about
loving your possessions come to mind when I have a hot iron in hand. I
smoothen, I iron and I fold with gusto, ironing out my own little worries as
well.
The one habit which I do dearly love is buying pens and pretty, little diaries. If you want to win my heart and my confidence, one little pen will do the trick. As I sit at my desk in my office, watching the children in school troop by, with a couple of them peeping in to show me a poem they have composed or a project they are proud of, my hands automatically go into a niche which houses sparkly star stickers, another obsession of mine. Watching a child smile, wide-eyed when he or she is praised is so heartwarming. Every time I go to South Africa where our daughter and her family live, I come back laden with stickers of all kinds.
Open my school diary, and hey presto, you will find a
riot of colours. Every day has tasks written with a different coloured pen.
After all, life is colourful and hence, why not incorporate those colours in
your writing as well? The Sagittarius in me induces me to live life in glowing technicolour.
A neat desk is an efficient desk! Unfortunately, my desk overflows with a motley collection of diaries, files, envelopes, sticky notes, bits of paper, cute pen holders of various kinds (another thing I love!) pens, pencils, stationery, the daily newspaper, my pink water bottle in which I carry hot water to drink (another fetish of mine!) While I may not boast of a tidy desk, I do have an imagination that runs riot, and proves useful for all the thriller novels and short stories that live in my mind, grow and get translated into paper.
We may take ages to form certain habits and a lifetime to
unlearn certain others. However, there is no doubt that it is our habits that make
us what we are, warts and all! As Gloria Steinem put it, “You cannot change
your future without changing your habits.”
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