To change your interior habits, change your exterior environment.
I recently heard this idea articulated in a podcast about entrepreneurship, but it’s a concept that rings true beyond business or the professional life, and absolutely in the spiritual life.
When I was a junior in college, I moved off campus to a four-person house with three friends from the baseball team, into what was affectionately (or infamously) known as “The Brick House.” Our house was one of the closer ones to campus while still being off campus and occupied by four 20-year old athletes, I’m sure you can fill in some details.
In spite of my living situation and the lifestyle that came with it, my junior year was one of a lot of spiritual growth. I had a friend in the seminary who was very much walking alongside me, challenging me, and encouraging me to give up certain habits and embrace new ones. Not at all that he was encouraging me to ditch my friends, but he was challenging me to live a life of virtue. What I ultimately realized was that it was difficult to do that in that house. Nothing at all against those guys; they were good friends, but it was the environment that was working against me.
For my senior year, I made the wild decision to move back on campus into a two-person apartment with only one bedroom. For my final year of college, for my victory lap, for being a big man on campus, I had decided to go back to essentially what it was like to be a freshman in the dorms.
I don’t know what words I would have used back then, but deep down I knew I needed a fresh start. I needed walls and furniture and stairs and a door that were different. I needed a different place to go home to be alone with my thoughts, or as alone as you can be with a roommate.
It was this idea that I was chasing: to change interior habits, change your exterior environment. I was also back on campus. I could walk to the chapel. I could walk to Mass. I had a place of retreat when I didn’t want to be somewhere, or be around certain behaviors. And my roommate was a friend who was not a drinking buddy, but a friend who was also pursuing the Lord.
My wife and I were talking recently about this idea and about how, in certain vocations, this concept is built into it. When the young woman enters religious life, everything changes. Her environment, the people she’s around, her habits, her routine, all change and hopefully provide guardrails and guidelines for her to mature and develop and grow closer to Christ.
I think there’s probably a parallel for the young man entering seminary. Again, it’s so different. He’s surrounded by other men who are pursuing the same thing, who are discerning the same path, and it comes with new walls, new buildings, new hallways, new pathways to walk. It’s not surprising that both of these vocations take a lot of discernment and fortitude in order to take the step into a new environment, to be willing to change everything.
Often the spiritual wisdom and spiritual writing that we find is written by priests and religious. They are the examples that are held up, and I think when we read those examples, our hearts understand that desire for a radical commitment. But as husbands, fathers, wives, mothers, even just lay people living in the world, it won’t look the same.
The laity doesn’t always have that luxury baked into our vocation.
It seems like the two pivotal moments where our exterior environment changes are if we go away to college and then when we stop being a student and start being a professional. Both of these environmental changes are not at all a guarantee that it’s for the better. Going to college or entering the workforce doesn’t guarantee growth, at least not spiritual growth. The people you’re surrounded by and the places you are, in many ways, can be toxic or contrary to the faith.
Of course, marriage might be that spiritual and vocational shake-up. Yes, it comes with plenty of changes from buying your first house to having children. But I am still not sure that the overnight environmental change is as dramatic as the priesthood or religious life.
(That’s not even to open the can of worms of all the people that lived together before marriage. This seismic shift in your spiritual life becomes more like a speed bump or a brief tremor.)
But, there are still plenty of lessons for us.
First, if we are in some bad habits, we have the opportunity to change our environment. Now, that doesn’t mean entering the monastery, but it might mean moving apartments. It might mean moving across town or to a new town. It might even mean looking for a new job, going to a new gym, picking up new hobbies, associating with new groups of people. All of those things can, in some sense, give us that shakeup, that change of scenery that we might just need. Because our environment is more than just the building that we reside in or work in. It can be the people, it can be the work that we give ourselves to, it can be what we consume.
Second, don’t miss the opportunity to build new habits and routines. That was what I realized back in college, when I moved to that apartment, and then when I moved to my first apartment after college, and then my first home with my wife. Each of those was an opportunity to establish new habits, new routines. That room is now the room that I pray in. That chair is now the chair that I sit in. This is the place that I go for a walk in the morning.
We are body and soul, and to help the soul, sometimes we need to look to the body. We need to look to our environment. Because to change interior habits, we can change our exterior environment.
PS: Want to go deeper? Here are three ways:
The Pray on Paper Club: A Catholic prayer mail club, delivered to your mailbox. Every month, a curated envelope arrives with sacred art, spiritual reading, prayers from the saints, a prayer intention from a fellow member, and much more.
The Victor’s Crown: If you enjoyed this, start your morning with a 2-minute reflection every weekday. Free, by email or in your podcast app.
The Prayer Journals: The Examination Journal and the Little Prayer Journal. Simple tools for building a habit of daily prayer through journaling and the examen.