Forming good habits
It may seem easier to form "bad" habits than it does to form good ones, but the process is the same.
No really it is.
Take any of the "normal" bad habits - smoking, drinking, eating too much of the "wrong" thing. Why do we do them? Well more often than not it is because we enjoy them or the feeling these things give to you. So surely if we can form bad habits because we want to do them and we enjoy the feeling and the emotional response we get - surely if we change our thinking about those things we know we need to do - but don't do as often as we should, then it should stand to reason we can create any new habit we want.
If you enjoy it and want to do it, then you will carry on doing it. So - pick one of those areas you should be cultivating - and enjoy the process. And if that is hard in the beginning - then fake it til you make it.
Pretend you are enjoying the walk, feeling the breeze on your skin, hearing the birds and the bugs, watch the clouds scud across the sky. Use the walking time to catch up on your music or your talking books, compose a book with each step - if you talk into a dictaphone while you walk, each step will take you closer to the finished item.
Or if a more healthy diet is your thing, then stop what you are doing when you are about to start eating. Enjoy the process of crunching through the skin of an applie. Inhale the scent, lick the drips of juice off your fingers. Savour the sweet water as it slides down your throat. And close your eyes whilst you are doing it. Eating is one of our greatest pleasures, yet we eat on the run and whatever we can lay our hands on. And what's even worse than that? Most of the time we don't even know what we've just eaten. So, slow down the process for a while. Pretend it is the only thing in the entire world you have to do right now and create a new habit of enjoyment.
With many thoughts
Elle
December 8, 2008 at 20:57
Reader Comments (3)
I am so pleased to have found this site. One minute confronting and challenging, the next pure poetry and time to absorb each message. Because there are so many hidden messages within each "story" if you care to look.
Many, many thanks
HDN
I. wish. I. had. an. apple. You are a vicious writer. I am only stocked with oranges!
Best to you.
Seth
"There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates – dies of malnutrition – because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.
The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage. (Chapter 25)"
which puts a lot of things into perspective. When people are forced off the land and onto the roads, yet their fellow human beings would prefer to see them suffer than help them, I wonder about the many displaced people in the world today and hope there will be enough oranges for all.