i'm reading a beautiful book right now called "life ahead" by krishnamurti. a man named marvin gave it to me at a writers group that we both attend. but the fact that it came from marvin cracks me up. the main underlying theme of the book is "love can only come from absensce of fear and the absense of fear can only come from the absense of tradition. marvin obviously believes in this book or else he wouldn't have given it to me. and yet everytime we go to the writer's group he sits in the exact same chair. is that not tradition? therefore, when he goes to the writer's group he is afraid, and i don't blame him, i am afraid when i go there too. but sitting in the same chair every single time he goes there is not going to make him less scared. you know what? next time i go to the writer's group i'm going to sit in his chair and see what happens. why do people cover themselves with the morals from books as if the fact that they have read and claim to believe in the book will hide their hypocricy?

Sitting in the same chair is habit, not tradition, which is a social concept. If Marvin selected what he thought was the best chair on the first day, then why should he sit in a lesser chair on any subsequent day? That would be inconsistent.

but is not habit tradition on a personal level?

Yes, I suppose one could say that. I have a habit of watching the news on TV when I get home from work. So it's a tradition in my house because my family respects my preference in TV viewing at that hour.

well i could talk more on tradition and habits, except that you've brought up a topic that is much more interested to me and that most likely will become related to the original topic somewhere along the future line: why do you watch tv, namely the news?