IT'S THE REPETITION, STUPID.*
*Apologies to James Carville, who famously stated the mantra for one of the successful Clinton presidential campaigns: "It's the economy, stupid."
The pizza is what did it. I was repeating the plan to myself, over and over for a couple of days that we would be ordering pizza on Sunday.
When Sunday came, my wife and I had a brief conversation about using up the left-overs on Sunday and ordering pizza on Monday (which happened to be the Presidents' Day Holiday) instead. So we did.
When Monday came, I forgot the short conversation and defaulted as it were to the plan I had repeated to myself for days. I thought that we had overlooked taking something out of the freezer for supper. My wife reminded me that we had decided on ordering pizza on Monday instead of Sunday. I did not remember the conversation at first; I only remembered the plan to order pizza on Sunday, which I had repeated to myself for a couple of days, sometimes without realizing that I was repeating the plan for pizza on Sunday.
I realized that I had molded my behavior around the repetition of an idea, a plan of action. The repetition made it real to me.
In baseball and softball, batters and fielders practice what they need to do until it becomes second nature. We called it "muscle memory." The hitter would repeat certain steps to successfully hitting a pitch, and the fielder would practice putting the glove down and setting the fielder's stance for ground balls, all almost like learning a sequence of dance steps – another area of learning by repetition.
Another example in my own life was learning the keyboard for a typewriter by constantly repeating the location of the keys until I knew their location with my eyes closed. (Was it Bill Gates who tried, unsuccessfully, to rearrange the keys on the keyboard? Or was it some other geek?)
Josef Goebbels is another example, the proponent of telling the Nazi's "Big Lie" by constant repetition. Although most people, me included, have focused on the "Big Lie" part of Goebbels' propaganda technique, repetition was the key to it.
With enough repetition, it appears that the human mind and body will respond as it has been trained by repetition to respond. The good news is that we have been given minds to think with, eyes to see with, and ears to hear with, so that we can be more than our repetition.
Perhaps especially when we realize that repetition is not always reality.
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