Lately, I keep thinking, We should go out for dinner earlier . . . before the restaurant gets busy.
Of course, I don’t care if restaurants are busy, but I do care if I can’t sleep because I ate too late in the day.
Back in the day, I used to finish eating dinner around midnight and have a double espresso with dessert. Even so, I’d still be sleeping thirty minutes later. But those days were a long time ago. Around that time, I was commuting by train. Every morning, I watched the same people standing in the same spot on the platform. A sad, old person’s habit. Or so I thought.
So, every morning I made sure I stood in a different spot on the platform. Sometimes at one end, sometimes in the middle. I tried hard to be random, but humans are not good at random. We are programmed to fall into patterns of behavior. It’s just more efficient.
Eventually, and without me noticing, I gravitated toward standing in the same spot so I was more likely to get a seat on the train.
These days, I’m a creature of habit. I religiously put my car keys in the same place. I watch the same channels on YouTube, read the same news outlets, and listen to the same podcasts.
Turns out the sad, old people on the train platform were just a preview of who I was destained to become.