Several years ago a friend and  neighbor gave me a potted plant he no longer wanted. I adopted it as if it had been mine all along.

It’s a spindly, palm-like creature, with sprouts that shoot up to reveal a collection of horizontally-oriented fronds. This dear, quirky plant sheds in installments: for months at a time, the effusion of green atop each stem will be universally verdant. Then, as if on cue, the lowermost fronds of each tuft start to brown, then fall from the stem altogether. At the same time, though far less visibly, the stem itself gains a half-inch or so, and the shoots continue their upward journey.

Ironically, it is in their dying that the lower fronds reveal how truly healthy the whole plant is.

It’s summer already in Houston. School’s been out for a week.

And yet, as I ride my bike early each morning past the several schools that greet me on my way back from the gym, the yellow “School Zone” speed lights blink their feverish morse code. The lights are timed to alert drivers during school hours. Sure enough, the hours are correct, it’s the time of year that is not. The lights are programmed to turn on at a certain hour, and have not been programmed to turn off during the summer months.

How many of our own actions are Pavlovian responses to things we’ve allowed to program us? How many times do we react, instead of thoughtfully responding, because, like the lights that blink whether school is in session or not, it’s what we’ve always done?