It's just "the way you hold your mouth"...

“HABIT” isn’t quite the right word for it; neither are “knack” or “acquirement”… nor is “technique”, although each has a bearing on it.

I’m looking for a word — an everyday word — that gathers up all of those things we learn to do that, once learned, we seldom think of again but continue to do: that riding-a-bicycle sort of thing.

“It’s the way you hold your tongue,” my dad would tell me.

The way these things are learned is often more a case of assimilation than study. It would be a sad and lonely geek, for example, who’d go to scholarly journals and books to learn how to ride a surfboard, make a good fly-fishing cast, ride a bicycle … or, to get exotic, bring down a wild cow with a triple-weighted gaucho boleadora. These are “cultural” things, to be sure, but they’re also physical.

Our unique bodily constitution and physiology play a role, setting limits and horizons: I could probably have learned to run faster but I could never in my life have become a competitive sprinter.

And another dimension to this sort of learning lies among other people, and the whole business of acquiring skills or attributes.

I remember watching in awe as one of my dad’s friends deftly rolled a cigarette with one hand. And the two-fingers-in-the-mouth whistle was another sure-fire way to impress boys like me. Now I watch handymen and carpenters with the same envious awe… there are definitely “cool” and “uncool” ways to handle a builder’s hammer, pencil, tape measure or chalk line.

Then there are tricks like ear waggling and knuckle cracking… it is all of these kinetic relationships and their interactions that refine the “knack” of doing something, and we experience the “knack” subjectively as an attainment and usually perform it in our own characteristic way. And the sum of it all becomes a part of our identity.

These little accomplishments, all added up and implicated with each other, become almost impossible to analyse, disentangle and describe in detail: think of the scientific elaboration and technical description, the psychological expertise and the physics you would need to objectively describe, detail and explain the implications, causes and consequences of, say, a golfer’s remark that “my drive was a bit off today”.

I’m sure that most of what I know about this side of myself is beyond my own view. I only get glimpses of it when I see someone giving me odd looks or doing something in some obviously different way but with the same practised facility and the same lack of self consciousness that I experience when I’m doing it “my way”. And it’s only then that I’m able to find a way to ask myself about the nature of our difference.
Perhaps the worst of it is that it is so easy to fall, in the same sort of way, into similar patterns in the way we think, cluttering our heads with untested assumptions, familiar ways of thinking, habit-formed ways of evaluating things, attractive or flattering ideas, popular wisdom, common sense, ideas about the way things are without really examining them... all of them cramping our imaginations and annihilating possibilities, opportunities, insights and adventure.

So, by way of example: 
Being used, I guess, to handles on things, I always peeled a banana by clasping the fruit in one hand and tugging at the stalk with the other. It never occurred to me to think about this. My dad did it this way. Sometimes the peel comes away reasonably easily; sometimes — especially if the banana is not so ripe — it’s a bit of a wrestle. I’ve even gone to the knife drawer and got the job started that way. For more than 50 years, that’s how I peeled a banana.

Then I learned that monkeys and sensible people peel bananas by nipping the opposite end of the banana with fingertips: the skin obligingly splits and the peel comes easily away. Having never lived among people that sensible — not at banana-peeling time anyway — and, having never been familiar with hungry monkeys and wild banana plants, I never learned the easy way to peel a banana. I’d never thought there night be a better way than struggling with what looked most like the tear-tab.

Sometimes — often, in fact — there’s not a lot at stake between one way of doing something and another. Learning several ways can sometimes be handy. And learning a whole lot of good ways to do a lot of stuff is how plumbers, electricians and carpenters, piano tuners, fitters and turners, surgeons and all of the other tradespeople make themselves so valuable to the rest of us and to society.

And often these things come out simply as mannerisms and accents: those particular ways of being who we are, a part of our social identity… our personality’s signalling system. We often can’t recall where or how we learned our particular little ways, and they are often unconscious… they’re “just the way you hold your mouth”.

At the beck and call of our personality, they can mean the difference between “cool” and “naff”, attractive or irritating. They’re often the characteristics our teenage children loathe most about us… while we grit our teeth as they endlessly repeat the latest “cool’ word. In other people, less well known to us, they lead us to draw conclusions about their background, interests, occupation, status, attractiveness, personality… they undoubtedly help to maintain class distinctions.

And from there, we are led to judge them.

We easily forget that it takes two to make a difference.

We easily forget that people who agree with us, and act like us, teach us little.

We easily forget that both sides of an argument can be — and often are — “wrong”.

We easily forget that the same signal can mean many things to many people… and can be disastrously misleading where there’s a cultural divide between us.

We easily forget that the “right” answer to the “wrong” question is as misleading and dangerous as the “wrong” answer to the “right” question.

We easily forget that people who seem very different from us can be as “good” as we are… and, given half a chance to express their intentions, may even turn out to be even more generous-spirited, more open, more hospitably motivated and more given to goodwill than we are.

We easily forget that it is too easy to esteem people who seem to exemplify our own aspirations… to be drawn to the resounding attraction of the affirmingly familiar, as opposed the apparent obstacle of the somewhat different.

And it can all boil down to “just the way they hold their mouths”… and maybe our timidity.