You Are What You Practice Most

We were three long hours from home on a snowy country road when it happened: a flat tire.  A pancake-flat tire.

I confess I fell prey to apprehension for an emotional several minutes, my default response to the frigid weather and predicament. If solo, I would have called AAA, or the new service that came with this new (old) car when we purchased it two weeks ago, and deferred the fixing to someone else. 

But I wasn’t alone.  My knight in shining armor, do-it-yourself husband with the bad heart and steely faith (in God if not himself), calmly came to the rescue without alarm – opened the hatch, retrieved the jack, applied the temporary donut-like wheel without undue exertion, and drove us to a tire store to purchase a used tire that would at least get us home.

Safe and sound this evening, I’m thinking about how human responses to circumstances, more than the circumstances themselves, shape us over time. While we sometimes say, “You are what you eat…or read, speak, love, give, believe, or perform,”  the following is also true: “You are what you practice most.”  We are creatures of habit, and whatever we habitually practice, we become.  Worrywarts habitually brood.  Gluttons habitually eat. Artists habitually create. Philanthropists habitually give. Saints habitually pray.

Sometimes I observe older people running their final laps in life with great interest. Can differences in disposition and actual personhood be, in some measure, determined by years of practicing responses?  This is a topic for further reflection.