Habit forming

How are habits made? Some seem forged very quickly. I find we only need to be on holiday for a day or two before we start talking about "our usual route to town" or "our usual cafe".  Some things take a little longer. Despite loving home made bread and using a lot of bread it's taken me years of intermittent baking to reach the stage where I bake every week. That's partly finding a method that has helpful timings, so it fits in easily with other things I do.

Piping, one way and another, doesn't seem to be becoming much of a habit with me. It's something I need to think about. I enjoy it very much when I do it, it doesn't take two minutes to pull the pipes out and get going, I think about music a lot, but somehow it's always an effort and there are always other things to do.

I'm not a hugely single-minded person. I like to dot about, doing a bit of this, a bit of that. I'm knitting a lot at present, but that's because I have Xmas presents to finish. Sometimes I spend a day at the weekend sitting on the sofa and reading all day. That's reasonably rare, and normally means I am very tired. It makes me peevish, the fan always says, and I always feel at the end that I've wasted a day. Even so there are times when I read very little. While I've been knitting it's taken me three weeks to read a single book.

While I might occasionally think that I haven't read much of late, or that I haven't done much knitting I never feel that ought to to do either. The mood comes and goes. I suppose the only hobby at all like music is needlepoint. I can happily have a piece on the go for two years. I like doing it, I like the finished product (although they tend to end up in the back of a cupboard), but I just do a bit here and there as the mood takes me. I don't feel any particular urge to complete the current piece. It's a very contemplative thing to do - I consider colours and the best way to fill a space, but don't normally think of the finished object.

So much as I like playing, and although I want to get better at it and need to play (a lot) more to do that, I somehow don't find the time, I haven't formed a habit of playing, and I don't know why.