Habits are talked about often in self-help books. Addictions are an extreme form of habit that are harder to stop. Superstitions are another form of habit practiced with the hope of influencing a positive outcome each time we carry them out.
Our habits. Small slices of our life. Easy to identify (sometimes). Adjustable, controllable, and stoppable within an arm’s reach and a tractor trailer’s pull.
Slices of our life do not make it whole. We need to look much wider to see something much more confining and limiting in our life. We didn’t plan for this but it happens. To all of us. Rich. Poor. College. No college. We are all the same.
I call the sum of these slices or habits as the habit of our life. The routines that mindlessly make up each of our days. This has nothing to do with our genes. It’s more than the concept of “baggage from the past” that so many blame for not realizing their dreams.
Same way, same people, same responses to situations (good or bad), pretty much the same “everything” each day, month and year of our lives. (Fill in the blank: Every Friday we…….) The habit of our life becomes so confining without notice because it happens slowly over time. We all become blind to this. No one is immune.
The inconsistencies and disappointment created from not knowing the habit of our lives is huge. We can’t march towards our dreams because we forgot to see who we are and consciously think about what we are doing today. We get lazy.
We fail to first ask ourselves these questions:
What are the routines that I do daily out of habit?
Will they help, hinder or have no effect
on the outcome I would like to enjoy tomorrow?
Discover what makes sense to stop, start or change today before deciding that your dreams will never come true. We have to “make room” before we can truly discover and introduce anything new into our lives through our choices.
This one is not about ability.
It’s about maturing enough to begin to see who you are while planning a trip to become who you want to be. Pack lightly. Change frequently. You may find that both you and the weather will be fine.