I’m a creature of habit. Every morning, I have a routine for washing the breakfast dishes. I do the flatware first because then it’s out of the way, rinsed and in the little cup made for it in the drying rack that sits in the right hand side of the sink.

I do the fork first, then the several spoons. Lastly I do the spatula and then the butter knife. I have this fantasy where my husband is watching me do the dishes … has watched me often in the past and has remembered (that’s part of the fantasy) the order in which I do them … and he says, “Do you always do it exactly the same way?” To which I answer, “No. Sometimes I wash the knife first.”

I’ve always been a bit obsessive. I, thankfully, have very little of the compulsive part of it. But, it seems that as I’ve grown older, habit and routine are standing in more and more for memory. I haven’t yet had to go check to see if I actually made the bed. But I can envision a future where that might be the case. Recently, while very deeply involved with working on my current novel, I’ve had trouble focusing on the other things I need to do in each day. So habit has come to my rescue.

I don’t really worry about senility, or Alzheimer’s, or dementia for myself. I do sometimes worry about it for my husband. Often, he can’t seem to remember something I told him a few hours ago. Of course, maybe it’s just that I wasn’t nearly interesting or entertaining enough. Then I think that maybe I should accompany everything I say to him with wild gestures and crazy expressions. In any case, now and then he comes up with some obscure piece of dialog from some movie we watched one time, ten years ago, and I think that maybe his memory is not a problem. Now attention span … a case could be made for that.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with habit and routine. It keeps you on track. But I guess one should be aware of when it might begin to cover for cognitive decline.

So I’ll just keep my routines. They inject a little purpose into a life that might otherwise seem to be without.

Photo and quote courtesy of LoveToKnow and Productive and Free, respectively