Once in high school, I was taught about that wonderful thing people like to call HABIT. I was taught that you should always try to develop good habits and try to avoid from cultivating bad habits. The main reason against the latter statement was the obvious persistent nature of Habits. She explained that nature as follows..
"HABIT.
Remove the first letter from it. A-BIT remains..
Remove the first letter from it. BIT remains..
Remove the first letter from it. IT remains.."
As you can see, it's very hard to get rid of an habit, and it such a situation all football lovers find themselves in right now.
The usual national leagues shut up shop for the season in the middle of May. In most summers, that means three months of no football as the next season starts only by August. But this summer, we've had the World Cup to bring us footy junkies some much needed action. But the rest days they have given between the rounds are making the withdrawal symptoms prominent.
Counting the time to the next kick-off (2 hours, 35 minutes), watching the replays, fighting online over what has been the moment of the tournament so far, or worse, indulging in transfer gossip (if you don't know what that means, you are one lucky $*^@&).
The only good thing about the rest days is that it prepares us for the next one month of no football following the final whistle at the Maracana on July 13th. There will be the occasional warm up matches for the clubs, but until the season begins in the middle of August, we'll never be satisfied.
And that's the thing about habits. It starts of as something small, a cue - a moment of weakness, a moment of indulgence or a moment of imagination. If the result entraps you to perform it again and again, then it becomes a routine. The result or the reward that you get depends on what you are actually doing. But it reinforces in you the need to keep going. These are not my words, but a widely accepted fact. See they even have got flow charts on it.
Anyways, for the five things for this week, we'll be looking at five such habits that I seem to have developed over the years.
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1. First thing I do on opening my eyes
Check my phone. This must be true for most of us, I guess. While our forefathers checked the direction to face while getting up, we now grope around our bed trying to find the phone, and then continue on to check the notifications in all our social networks. I got a mobile phone in the 18th year of my life, and this is a habit of mine only since. The reason for this habit must be the urge to keep up-to-date with all that's "happening".
2. Charm
My house is right behind a temple, which I visit often. There's a banyan tree at the temple. If you have to reach the banyan tree, you've to climb three steps. And I always touch the topmost step at the exact same point with the index finger of my right hand. Why? I haven't figured that out myself. But I can tell you that I'm afraid of not doing it for the consequences. It's my charm.
3. Double Checking
If you were to stalk me, and I know some of you do that quite religiously, you would find me parking my bike, locking my bike, walking away from my bike, come back to my bike, check if I locked my bike, and walk away again from my bike. I know the reason for this one. I wouldn't call me absent minded, but I do "zone out" a lot and start thinking about stuff unrelated to what I'm doing. Hence, I end up double checking.
4. Matchday Colors
If you didn't know, most clubs and countries have a minimum of two, a normal of three matchday colors. That is they have two or three kits to choose from on what to wear for a particular match. And whenever Arsenal play, I wear the kit top that they are wearing for that match.
This started off a scathing comment from a friend who noticed that I was wearing the same thing as the team on the tele. At that time, it was just cos of the fact that I tend to have a lot of Arsenal tops and I tend to love wearing them. But something changed that day, and wearing matchday colors became a good luck charm for me and my team.
5. THIS!!!
If this isn't a habit, what else is?? I've been here, every Friday for the past 65 weeks, making these posts. There was a cue, there was a routine and there has been a reward. Thank you all.
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P.S. This is the 100th post on this site. I write around 1000 words per post. That puts the number of words sown over here to be an estimated 1,00,000. Over two years before, I decided that I would think about writing a book only if I can hit that number. Well, I think I should start dusting off my "celebrated author" dreams.
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Well, last week's matches were a drag. More often than not, I was praying for the match to get over within the regulation time. We've eight more matches before they pack up everything at Brazil. I sincerely hope that those are better than what we got in the first knockout stages.
In a few hours, the two teams I support at this tournament will kick off, trying to kick each other out of the tournament. Germany vs France. Whichever way it goes, it's heartbreak for me. But I guess a German victory would hurt a little less.
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Well, that's all for this week.
Hope you have a great weekend.
'til next week.
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