Every day we are faced with opportunities to naturalize something new. Children and pets are experts at this when they try to make an event into a precedent. Say we give a sweet as a reward for behaving well at dinner. The next evening the child says, ‘Where is my after-dinner sweet?’ A good deal of daily life is a struggle over what is going to enter the repertoire of routine, and there are tacit rules of repetition which govern how often things must be discussed before they can be done without discussion, how often things have to be repeated by agreement or with supervision before they can become an accepted part of shared daily routine.
Concluding Thoughts
My whole life I have had a deep aversion to hypodermic needles and injections, to the point of nausea, and I fell to the floor unconscious when I had to watch a doctor put a large needle into my wife’s stomach for an amniocentesis. Three years ago I was prescribed a medicine which I have to inject twice a week. The very thought of doing so made me physically sick. The nurse who taught me how to give the injections broke the process down into a series of individual steps. First you squeeze air out of the syringe, then you open the alcohol swab, and so on. Turning the unimaginable act into a series of mundane easily learned activities broke down my resistance. Decomposing the routine in this way turns out to be an ancient technique of training, adapted well to complex technological operations like flying an aeroplane, where one begins with a ‘checklist’. Once learned in bits and pieces, the whole routine is easy to assimilate, and after four or five injections, my phobia was gone.
The Edge of Agency
151