Growing up with my Nani, to this day, I could almost reenact a morning in her life with a blindfold on. Wake up around 7 a.m., munch on wheat toast with peanut butter and whatever fruit-filled jam she was craving while re-heating that same cup of coffee until the last drop was finally sipped right around noon. Meanwhile, the ink from the Fort Worth Star Telegram left its mark on her pink-polished nails and white linen tablecloth. When she’d gotten to the classifieds, it meant 10 a.m. had rolled around and Bob Barker would grace that old television set as he announced who the next contestant would be to guess which price was right.

I’m not sure if it was due to retirement or routine, but every morning for at least the last 10 years of her life went about like that. I could go on about her days of walking two miles in the same neighborhood she lived in for 50 years and watching Dr. Phil at 3 p.m., but I’m becoming far too nostalgic and to be quite frank, they aren’t paying me enough for that.

What I’m getting at is the habit. A habit, by definition, reads: “a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up.” If Mick Jagger sang about it, then it must be true. The definitive proverb proves we are creatures of habit, sometimes with good reason and sometimes wrecking havoc wherever we go. Old habits, both good and bad, do indeed die hard.

We all have good habits like remembering not to litter or remembering not to call your ex when you’ve had too much vodka or remembering not to eat the entire box of donuts your skinny co-worker brought to sabotage the umpteenth cleanse you happen to be on that week.

Then there are the habits that aren’t so easy to break like oversleeping and missing the gym for the seventh day in a row, eating Oreos and peanut butter in bed much to your partner’s dismay, or succumbing to peer pressure and that shot of Fireball even though you, along with everybody else, knows that you can’t shoot whiskey like you used to and now, even smelling a cinnamon candle makes you queasy.

I was a daycare teacher in high school and six months into the career change, I found myself greeting strangers at the grocery store with high-fives. When I finally confronted the extent of the problem I had to force myself to tone-down these gestures and keep them for my three and four-year-old students rather than the guy on aisle 8. Though that was an easier habit to break than most, I still like to think of myself as a success story. Thank you, thank you very much.

But then there are the habits not even worth mentioning unless you’ve got all day. The ones some call demons and others know as diseases. The ones we pay our therapists to fix because it’s a difficult thing to abandon any deeply routine life, even if you despise it.

Similar to old habits, none of what I’m saying here is new. The late philosopher Aristotle lived in 384 B.C. and said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.” Seeing as I’m a writer and not a mathematician I gave up trying to figure out exactly how many years ago 384 B.C. was, but let’s just go with a lot. So a lot of years ago some well-to-do guy in Greece said this really clever thing about habits and I find that its relevance holds true to this day.

Because habits have such a stronghold in our day-to-day lives, wouldn’t you think we ought to start paying more mind to them?

Let us selfishly establish a routine that will create for us a life of happiness and stability that thrives on adventure and silent laughs that leave you breathless. We must be purposeful with intent rather than persevering in non-fulfillment because as the saying goes, “If we do what we’ve always done, we will get what we’ve always got.”