The Shape of Consistency

steam on window glass
hands repeat a quiet task
time becomes a friend

The best book is not the one that appears in curated lists or glossy interviews. It is the one you reach for when the laundry cycle is still spinning and the floor hums beneath your shoes.

I learned this once in Geneva. The laundromat was narrow, fluorescent lights buzzing above cracked tiles, detergent smell floating somewhere between citrus and nothing. I had brought with me a heavy book a colleague had insisted I must read, something intellectual enough to impress, but the words slid past me like rain down glass. My eyes moved but nothing stayed. Then, on the shelf where people leave behind what they no longer need, I noticed a battered crime novel, its spine bent, its cover curling at the edges. I picked it up. Two hours passed without me noticing the machines had stopped.

That was the first lesson. Consistency doesn’t come from the things you think you should do, but from the ones that catch you almost against your will.

I have failed enough times to know the difference. In Zurich, one summer, I bought new running shoes, shorts, and even one of those digital watches that measured everything. I decided this would be my routine: morning runs along the lake. For two weeks I forced myself into it. But each run was an argument with my body, a negotiation I never fully won. Then one afternoon a friend lent me an old road bike, handlebar tape fraying, chain a little stiff. I rode toward Kilchberg with no plan. The rhythm of pedaling, the wind in my ears, the quiet sense of covering distance without punishment — it felt like something that belonged. The next day I rode again. And again. Consistency doesn’t feel like discipline. It feels like return.

Food teaches this as well. During my student years in Ljubljana, I tried for a time to eat what I thought counted as healthy: complicated salads, quinoa bowls, bland lentils seasoned with guilt. They never lasted. What stayed were the simple things I wanted without effort: polenta with butter, bread still warm from the bakery, burek at four in the morning after nights out. I’ve since eaten in expensive places where plates resembled museum exhibits, but the meals I return to are humble, repetitive, and alive. The best food is not the most fashionable. It’s the one you reach for again and again without thinking.

Work follows the same thread. The most meaningful work I’ve done came in a second-floor room in Reykjavik, above a record shop where the radiator clicked all day. The sky stayed dim for weeks at a time, never quite waking. No deadlines, no money on the line, just notes I wanted to write, ideas I needed to see outside my head. I would have paid to sit there. Hours slipped and reassembled themselves. That work was consistent because it wasn’t borrowed from someone else’s ambition. It was mine.

I have tried the other way. I’ve copied habits from books, podcasts, clever strangers. The perfect morning routine with lemon water, ice baths, affirmation journals. Those mornings felt like borrowed clothing two sizes too small. I wore them for a week, maybe two, and then the fabric tore. What stayed, in the end, were the quiet things: sharpening knives every Sunday, cycling familiar routes until they became maps in my legs, rereading books I thought I’d outgrown.

Consistency doesn’t shout. It lives in the modest rhythms that disguise themselves as nothing.

I once sat in a café in Porto, windows fogged in winter, the clock on the wall five minutes slow. Every morning the same man came in, ordered a coffee and a glass of water, and copied a poem by hand into a notebook. He dated the page, closed the book, sat for a moment watching the street, then left. The ritual looked like almost nothing. But one year of that is a collection. Ten years is a life with shape.

In Oaxaca I met a printmaker who told me sharpening was most of his work. He pulled leather across the edge of a chisel again and again, holding it against the light until it glinted the way he wanted. “The print is the shadow,” he said. “The real work is the repetition with steel.” Consistency isn’t repetition of boredom. It’s repetition of attention.

I’ve seen the opposite. A friend in Seoul forced himself into a strict schedule because a podcast told him to. Wake at five, drink bitter tea, cold showers, affirmations that read like auditions for a role in someone else’s life. In three weeks he collapsed, angry at himself for failing. Months later he joined a neighborhood swimming group that met after work. They swam laps slowly, mostly for the steam room talk afterward. He’s been going for years now. Consistency thrives when it attaches itself to joy, to community, not to self-flagellation.

Small frictions matter too. I leave my guitar out on a stand, because if I had to unzip a case every time, I wouldn’t play. Apples stay in a bowl on the counter, because if I put them in the fridge drawer they disappear. A pen I like rests on a notebook that always sits on the kitchen table. These things aren’t about discipline. They’re about removing the small reasons not to begin.

The fanciest version of a habit almost never survives. The perfect gym across the city fails against the small, sweaty one down the street. The expensive leather notebook gathers dust, while the cheap Moleskine fills with words. The elaborate recipe never becomes tradition, but the bread with tomatoes and oil does.

Shame kills more habits than laziness. People abandon simple routines because they look modest compared to someone else’s grand rituals. But modest done daily is better than grand done briefly. I had a neighbor in Vienna who did pushups every evening while waiting for water to boil. He never talked about fitness. He never bought equipment. He looked the same for years, which is to say, steady.

I think often of the small rituals that have carried me quietly: sharpening knives with the radio on, cycling familiar roads until the bends became part of my body, rereading Darwin’s On the Origin of Species slowly, not to learn new facts but to feel how patient observation builds truth. Returning to the basics doesn’t feel like progress, but it builds the deepest grooves.

If you need a test for whether a habit belongs to you, try this: do it every day for a week in the smallest way possible. Ten minutes instead of an hour. Five pages instead of fifty. If, on the eighth day, you reach for it automatically, keep it. If relief floods you when you stop, let it go.

Another test: ask whether you’d keep the habit if no one knew. No tracking apps, no posts, no audience. If the answer is yes, you’ve found something close to real consistency.

The man in Geneva who left behind that crime novel never knew he started a chain for me. Since then I always carry a book I actually want to read, not one that looks good on a table. I read in train stations, on benches, in lines where time is wasted anyway. One small decision, repeated, has become the longest shelf in my life.

And maybe that’s all consistency really is. The willingness to let modest repetitions build until they change the texture of your days. Water wearing stone. Pages turning into chapters. Beans simmering into weeks.

Consistency isn’t discipline in a uniform. It’s attention given permission to return.