This morning I am thinking about giving up. No, not like that — giving up something, as Catholics do for Lent, as Buddhists do as part of their daily practice. Fasting, essentially, though not necessarily with food. I am also thinking about taking on new things. I am thinking about habits: how to change the ones I have, how to cherish the ones I want to keep, how to gain new ones despite my general inertia.

I’ve changed habits in the past. Probably the biggest one was giving up smoking. I started smoking cigarettes my senior year of high school, quickly rose — or fell — to a pack a day (20 cigarettes a day, for those who don’t have experience with the short straws of death, a little more than one an hour), where I stayed for almost all of the next seventeen years. Sometimes I’d smoke more, often I’d smoke less; I quit for nine months, and then slid right back into it for another year or two before giving it up entirely in 2008. That was a tough change, because so many things I did were closely associated with smoking: I never finished a meal without having a cigarette, and I never drank coffee or alcohol without adding burning tobacco fumes. Whenever I talked on the phone, whenever  I took my dog outside, whenever I walked anywhere — always smoking, all of the time. I thought of myself as a smoker as much as a liberal, or a teacher, say. It defined me. I watched the clock all day long, not intently, but always aware of about how long it had been since my last cigarette and how long until I could justify  having another one. (My rule was 30 minutes. Unless there was an external deadline, such as getting to work or getting on a plane; then I would chain-smoke as much as possible, to “save up” extra nicotine for the time I would not be able to smoke.) I  had to change all of that, and it was extremely difficult, to say the least.

To be honest, the habit bothered me more than the actual smoking. The addiction. I hated not being in control. I hated that it was so damn hard for me to change the way I did things, once I decided to change. I wanted my willpower to be enough to break my physical need for nicotine. It wasn’t, of course —  I highly recommend nicotine patches for those who are thinking about quitting — but what was worse, was that my willpower wasn’t even enough to change my habits: even after I got past the craving for nicotine, I wanted to smoke just because I was used to it, familiar with it; it felt strange to put my things in my pockets in the morning and not add my lighter and my pack. I wanted to smoke while talking on the phone just because I had done it for so long, and I didn’t want to change.

But I did want to change: it’s just that my habits told me I didn’t want to. It’s like when I started flossing regularly, which I didn’t do until I was in my 20s (After I had one dentist visit that revealed 16, yes SIXTEEN cavities. Not only did I not floss, but I smoked and I drank unending cups of coffee that were probably 60% semi-dissolved sugar.), and at first I hated it just because it wasn’t what I had done before. It wasn’t difficult, didn’t take too long, wasn’t too expensive or morally questionable; none of the things that make habits hard to adopt. It was just  hard because it wasn’t what I was used to. No other reason. Now, of course, if I don’t floss, my teeth feel filthy. Now it would be hard to give up flossing.

So there’s the thing, really. I want to be better at changing habits, at giving up things I don’t want and taking on things I do want. It’s not always hard: I moved to vegetarianism without many qualms, and I quit arguing on debate forums cold turkey; I’ve given up television more than once, and this isn’t the first time I’ve managed to adopt a daily writing habit — though I am a little ashamed to admit that those habits don’t last, that there is always a day when I decide not to write, and then a few more days after that one, and then I’m back to not writing for days or weeks at a time. I suppose, then, that I want to be better about keeping some habits as well as getting rid of others. And it seems to me that the way to get good at this is to practice: essentially to get into the habit of changing habits.

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to start with one week at a time: every week, starting on Sunday, I’m going to change one habit for the week, either give something up or take something on. It doesn’t have to be something I consider vital and life-changing, like giving up smoking was; it just has to be a habit. The new ones don’t have to be good, either: I’ve always been inspired by Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me, and his subsequent TV shows with the same theme of changing a lifestyle for a pre-determined time. So I may try doing something not so good for me, but maybe something I have wondered about, or feel like I’ve missed out on. (Those won’t be big things. I’m not going to try heroin for a week.  Nor, like, picking up a girl in a bar every night. This is not going to be exciting.) I don’t have a definite plan for this; we’ll see where it goes.

The first thing I’m going to give up, for this week, is — background noise. Specifically, music and podcasts and radio news. I’m giving up my headphones and my speakers.

This comes partly because I take my dogs on long walks on the weekends, and I’ve been listening to NPR, except I FREAKING HATE SCOTT SIMON, the cheesy self-indulgent grief monger who hosts Weekend Edition on Saturdays. So I started listening to a podcast, Sunday School Dropouts, which is about two non-Christians reading through the Bible, book by book. And that’s great, but I’m not always in the mood, so sometimes I dial around the radio, and sometimes I listen to the songs I have on the iPod I carry with me.

But sometimes, recently, I have listened to — nothing at all. I have thought my thoughts, instead. Doing that was inspired by and inspiration for this new blog format I’ve been doing, this daily recording of my thoughts in (generally) shorter form than my usual post. I’ve thought about things I’m writing, my novels and stories, and I have had very productive times doing it. This morning I listened to a little of NPR (I hate that maudlin putz Simon, but I like Lulu Garcia-Navarro, who runs the show on Sundays. But I loathe Will Shortz and his damn puzzles, so I shut it off every time that twit comes on.) and then the podcast, and then music. And I realized: I’m not enjoying any of these right now. So what if I listened to none of them?

What if I did that every time I walk the dogs? Or drive to get groceries, or to work? What if I didn’t turn on Pandora first thing when I get into my classroom? What if, for the hour every night  I take the bird out of his cage, we sat in silence — and my only music was what he might feel like whistling to me? What would that be like? Would I hate it? Or would I enjoy the peace and quiet? Would it make me anxious to sit in the looming quiet, or would it help me think my  thoughts?

So to answer those questions, and to work on my control over my habits, I’m going to try it. This week, no music, no radio, no iPod. No Pandora, no YouTube. If there is ambient music around me, in the grocery store or the gym, that’s fine; but I’ll try not to listen too close, try to block it out and stay in my own head.

We’ll see how it goes. I’ll report on it next weekend.