Why My Habits Fall Apart on the One Day I Take Off

The aluminum steamer has been sitting on its rack, bone dry, since Sunday noon. Seven in the morning, Monday. By now on any other day I would have sold out the first pot of sticky rice, hands slick with scallion oil, asking "savory or purple?" so fast I could not hear the words myself.

Today I am off. I sit at the kitchen table with my phone in my hand, and the whole morning slips by without me doing a single one of the things I usually feel proud of keeping up. I do not call my mother in the village. I do not sit down for breakfast, I stand at the sink and eat a steamed bun. I cannot get through one page of the book on my bedside shelf. At ten I realize I have been looking at the wall for I do not know how long.

I am Lụa, and I have sold sticky rice at the mouth of an alley for twelve years. This is about why my day off, the only morning I get for myself, is the day my small habits vanish completely, and what I tried to do about it.

It is not that I am lazy, and it is not that taking a day off means you simply loosen up. I used to think so, and thinking so, every Monday ended in blaming myself. What I saw after a few months of paying attention was different: the habits did not fade because I had gotten weaker. They faded because something was holding them in place, and that something took the day off along with me.

What holds my habits up, and is missing on Monday?

On a working day, at nine-forty, I wash the last steamer, set it on the rack and sit down on the front step. My hands are still wet. I call my mother. She usually picks up while feeding the chickens, grain pattering behind her, and her first words are always "Sold out yet, child?" Not once have I thought "ah, time to call Mother." Finishing the steamer is what sends my hand reaching for the phone.

I believed it was my habit. It took a Monday to learn it was the steamer's. No steamer to wash, no moment that counts as "done washing," and with no "done washing" my hand has nothing to do next. Sitting down to breakfast works the same way: on selling days I only sit when the rice runs out, and the rice runs out every morning. The page before sleep too. I read it because I am tired when I lie down, and I am tired because I get up at three. Three habits I took to be mine, and each one turned out to be hooked onto something in the rice stall.

Under that there is another layer, and it kept me quiet for a good while. For twelve years I have never had to decide anything about my mornings. The stall handed me something I thought was my own: a day with rails already laid, and all I had to do was walk on them. On the day off the rails are gone, and I found I had never laid a single one myself.

What scared me a little was not forgetting to call my mother. It was that I did not feel bad about it until evening, which means nothing in the whole morning reminded me.

Thoa, who runs the grocery next door, came over with the electricity bill and found me on the step at half past ten.

— Day off, Lụa? Why have you been sitting there all this time?

— I do not know what to do, Thoa.

— It is a day off and you ask what to do. Just sit. Enjoy it.

She is right, in her way. But I was sitting and not enjoying it, and I wanted to know why.

The first time I did it, I wrote two habits and got stuck on the third, chewing my pen for nearly a minute. Calling Mother had a clear anchor. Sitting down for breakfast was vague. The book took me a long time to trace back to "lying down tired." To me a vague answer is still an answer, because it tells you that habit is standing on soft ground. A few weeks later I caught an anchor in the very moment it happened: hand holding the steamer, and my head saying "after this, it is the turn to call Mother." Thoa tried it with me for a week and said she managed one line, then dropped it. That is fine too.

The version for a busy day is much shorter: write one habit and one anchor, on the edge of the calendar or the cover of the selling notebook. One line.

When I first noticed all this I drew a different lesson from it, and it was wrong. One week I got up at exactly three on my day off, went to the kitchen, laid out sticky rice and pretended to soak it, trying to rebuild a whole selling day inside the day off so my habits would have something to cling to. After two weeks I hated Mondays. Doing that made the day off play the part of a working day, and in the end there was no day off left. What suits me better is carrying back one anchor, not the whole track.

When there is no ready-made anchor, what do you use?

I will call later. Later is fine. Mother is not going anywhere.

I said that to myself four Mondays in a row, at seven, at eight, at nine. By eleven I called, because it felt rude to wait any longer, not because it was my turn. By then my mother was back from the market, the chickens and the dog no longer sounded behind her, and the call came out clipped.

The first thing I tried was an alarm for nine-forty, the same time as any other day. It rang while I was combing my hair, and I swiped it off, thinking I would remember in a minute. The next Monday it rang while I was taking out the trash. Swiped it off. By the third week I had renamed the alarm "call Mother," and it still got swiped away.

It took me a long time to see why. An alarm is an order, and people get used to arguing with orders. A steamer touching its rack does not order anyone. It just happens, while I am busy with something else, and the next thing follows on by itself. To replace the steamer I needed something that also just happens, not something that reminds.

I noticed that the soy milk seller pushes his cart past the mouth of the alley every morning around half past seven. The cart has a wind chime made of a few thin steel tubes that clatters from far off to near, then goes quiet when he stops. On selling days I never hear it, because I am scooping rice. On my day off I hear every note.

From the fifth Monday I said one sentence out loud: "When I hear the soy milk chime, I go buy a cup, sit on the step, and call Mother." One sentence, said on Sunday evening before turning off the light. Not written down, no alarm.

The first two Mondays I heard the chime and only thought "yes, a chime." On the third Monday my hand went feeling for the phone in my shirt pocket before my head had thought anything, exactly like after washing the steamer. It might have been a lucky morning. I do not know, because there was a Monday I forgot completely, the soy milk man did not come, and I went back to staring at the wall.

Before I found the soy milk man I tried another anchor, and it failed in a way I did not see coming. I chose "after I finish tidying the house." It sounded sensible, because tidying done means free hands. But my house is never done. At eleven I still had a pot lid to scrub and a shirt to hang, and the call to Mother kept sliding behind a job with no finish line. An anchor with no clear moment of ending is not an anchor, it is a vague promise wearing an anchor's clothes.

If I am out somewhere far on a Monday, I use the short version: whenever I am standing and waiting, at a light, in a queue, for someone to hand back a flask. The anchor is "waiting," and the call is one sentence, "Have you had breakfast, Mother?" A short call counts too.

Gone, or just waiting for the steamer?

Three in the morning on Tuesday, the kitchen light comes on, the rice has been soaking since the evening, and I set the steamer on the stove without anyone telling me to. At nine-forty I wash the last steamer, sit on the step, and my hand reaches for the phone by itself. Mother picks up, grain pattering, "Sold out yet, child?" As if there had never been a Monday.

The first time I saw this I was a little stunned. A habit that had "vanished" yesterday was fully intact today, and I did not have to relearn it from scratch. It had not died. It was like the steamer in the cupboard: not lost, only with no stove to sit on.

What embarrassed me came after that. I realized I was reading the two days in two different ways. A good Tuesday, and I said "I am a person with order." A bad Monday, and I said "I am lazy, I am broken." Same person on both days, the only difference being that one day had rails and the other did not. I was taking the day with rails as proof of my character, then taking the day without as proof of the opposite, and neither proved anything about me.

I tried one small thing: on Tuesday morning, right when my hand goes for the phone after washing the steamer, I tried to catch whether the hand moves first or the head. A single second of watching, for three mornings. The first two mornings I missed it, because by the time I remembered, the phone was already in my hand. On the third morning I caught it, and the hand really did go first, and I laughed out loud on the step by myself. Some people will find it the other way round, the head thinks and then the hand goes. That is worth knowing too. On a busy day, skip it and lose nothing, because it is only for looking.

I also made a mistake that I still make now and then: using Tuesday to scold Monday. "See, you managed Tuesday, so why not yesterday." It sounds like encouragement, but really it is punishing a day without a steamer with a day that had one. It helps me to say it the other way, "Tuesday worked because of the steamer," and let that be the last sentence. As for whether someone who has sold rice for only a few months gets that feeling of the hand going before the head, I do not know. It may take a long stretch of time.

Is there a habit worth letting go?

Here I have to be honest and say I do not know.

My daughter Mi, fifteen, was eating a bun with me on Monday morning, looking through the doorway at the book beside my bed.

— Mom, you do not read on Mondays?

— On my day off I fall asleep the moment I lie down, child.

— So you read because you are tired?

I could not answer at once. She had hit on something I had seen without naming: the page before sleep is the habit of a tired person. On my day off I am not tired in that way, so it vanishes, and it vanishes in the right place. I had counted it on the list of "things I break on Monday," when maybe it had not broken at all. It only had nothing to do.

This is the hard part, and I will leave it as it is: not every habit that disappears on a day off needs rescuing. Some are worth rescuing, like the call to Mother, because if I skip it on Monday she will not hear my voice until the afternoon. Some are worth letting rest with me, because forcing them through the day off is just extra work. The third one, sitting down for breakfast, I have not managed to sort. This morning I sat and ate, but I sat because the table was there, for no other reason.

One way to sort them I borrowed from my selling notebook. At the end of each month I check which day was short of something and which was over, then decide whether to sell less or more tomorrow. I do the same with the habits: I do not count them like points, I only ask each one, "Last Monday, if it had not been there, would I have missed it that afternoon?" Some I would, some I would not. The ones I would miss, I find an anchor for. The others I leave alone.

I once tried the opposite and it went wrong: holding on to all three. That Monday I called Mother at nine-forty by alarm, sat down to eat by forcing myself, and read in daylight "to make it count." By evening the whole day off looked like a list of chores not yet crossed out. Harder than a selling day.

If you tried it and the paper is still sitting there

My map is folded in four and tucked into the cover of the selling notebook, and some weeks I forgot it was in there. If you tried this and nothing seems different, I think there are usually two things going on.

The first is that the anchor you chose does not actually happen on your day off. I once chose "when Thoa opens her shop," and she changed her hours all week, and my anchor drifted with her. A good anchor is something you hear, see or touch without having to keep watch for it. If you are keeping watch, pick another.

The second is that the habit was always the job's, not yours, and it is right to rest. Nothing to fix. A habit you miss will tell you itself, by leaving you short of it that afternoon.

Some people will not fit this way of looking at things either. They have no working week steady enough to lay rails, so a day off is no different from any other day, and a map of anchors has nothing to draw. If that is you, your question lives somewhere else, and it needs a different post. You could read about a day of trying to live without being productive, where rest is seen from the other side.

And if what you want is to hook a habit onto something you have just finished, washing your drinking glass right after you use it is the tidiest example of that I have read.

Last Monday, half past seven, the wind chime came clattering in from the end of the alley.

I was sitting on the step, a cup of soy milk still hot in my hands, listening to the grain pattering behind my mother.