It’s been quite some time since I posted anything. I’ve been hampered down by my own demons who, as you may very well know, can sometimes bore through your toughest armors and get you where it hurts the most. Gratefully, I’m starting to find my rhythm back into my life and finding a firm foothold on my life’s path.
It’s just this morning that I started to think about the concept of starting small, building slow, putting one foot in front of the other, putting your head down, doing the work, and staying the course until time and compounding take care of your progress and at one point when you least realize it, you’ll raise your head up and notice how far you’ve gone. This is the gradual slow-turkey way of doing things, which is quite of the highest potency as a foundational life truth.
But as I was considering the power of habits, creating systems that carry you slowly but surely towards your goals, like the old Turtle versus the Hare story, I caught a glimpse of my own very old habit of breaking old habits cold turkey. This is basically how I quit sugar, how I quit smoking, how I changed my diet, and how I started working out. You swear off the very thing you’re addicted to, cut all ties burn all boats, and demolish all bridges until nothing is left to get you back to that place where you never want to be ever again.
The problem with that cold-turkey method, of course, is that it’s got a major weakness in it, and that is human ingenuity will figure out a way to get back to that forbidden place no matter the obstacles, minefields, barbed wires, and motes filled with molten lava that you put in the way. If you really want to do something, if you’ve fallen off the wagon, if you’ve lost your firm grip on what matters to you the most and allowed your demons to win the fight, you’ll find yourself right where you started faster than you can imagine.
You know what I’m talking about, even if our struggles are different from one another. There is this one area—or several—in your life where you feel at the deepest end of an endless steep dark well of despair and hopelessness. You snap out of it for one reason or another. Perhaps, you’re faced with the harsh words of tough love from someone close to you, or it’s a book your read, a song that spoke to your feelings, a movie that rekindled your self-belief, or even a random social-media post guided by the almost mind-reading algorithms that can detect how you feel and what you’re looking for before you can even consciously think of it. No matter what it is, you suddenly look up and you see the light at the top of the well, you smell the fresh air, you see the blue skies where birds are soaring freely, and you imagine yourself there.
You only can do it if only you keep looking forward and move slowly with your hands and feet clinging to the wall bricks and stones in a tight persistent effort. It seems like a momentous effort at times, and you must only look in front of you almost 90% of the time, and when it gets tough, you only need to close your eyes and breathe in deeply until it’s time to move up again.
If your mind plays tricks on you and made you look up, you’ll see that you’re nowhere close to reaching the top. It will weaken your resolve and your arms and legs will suddenly feel tired and you’ll slip and fall back to rock bottom almost instantaneously.
Alternatively, your own demons might call on you to look down where you’ve started. If you give in and start listening to them and looked down to notice that you haven’t really gone that far at all, then you looked up to see how far you still have to go, and again it feels easier to just let go and be on “solid ground” again with your crowd.
Or it could be something as simple as pure old-fashioned fatigue and weakness that get to you along the way even if you’ve fixed your gaze straight in front of you glued to the present moment in time, fixated on the here and now of every move you’re making, with your ears completely blocked off with hardened wax to never hear the calls of the sirens that want to crash your boat. You may simply run out of steam and stamina and you fall off the face of the mountain due to no fault in your focus and determination. Sometimes you’re simply not strong enough.
When that happens to you, and it’s bound to happen one way or another, you have got to understand that your mind, as well as your body, are preprogrammed to keep the status quo for as long as possible. Some call it Homeostasis or Confirmation Bias, or the Base Line, or whatever, it’s all the same thing. Your mind and body will always fight you when you’re trying to introduce change in your life.
In Newtonian physics, as per the first law of motion: a body at rest will always remain at rest unless an outside force acts on it, and a body in motion will stay in motion unless an outside force acts on it. There will always be resistance to change in your life.
Imagine that you’re in a car and you’re trying to move from a full stop. The engine needs to exert a lot of power on the wheels in order to get them moving from a position of rest, and this is why cars have a gearbox whose only function is to regulate the amount of torque that is transferred from the engine rotation to the wheels in first gear. Once the car starts moving, you have to shift into second gear to really get some speed going which is less of an effort on the engine than when the car was standing still.
On the other hand, if you ever find yourself in a dead-end alley and you cannot go forward and there’s no way to go but back, you will first have to use the breaks to slow down the car to a standstill before you engage the gearbox in reverse and get the hell out of there as soon as possible.
Changing your status from rest to action requires a lot of initial effort. Your body and your mind will not accept these instructions easily. Changing your status from going in the wrong direction at speed will also take a lot of effort to slow down before you start moving in the opposite direction. Your body and mind also will resist the changes you’re trying to make.
This is exactly why you will find it hard to adopt a new lifestyle or quit powerful addictions.
Consider your life a boat drifting in the wrong direction. You will need to take charge as the captain and start giving commands to the crew to engage the engines at full power, take control of the wheel, and steer the rudder of the ship away from the iceberg. The boat will keep drifting in the wrong direction for a while and your course corrections will not be instantaneous, but with the engines running, the propellers working at full speed pushing the water from underneath your boat, and the rudder pointing in the right direction, slowly but surely the boat will start sailing exactly to where you’ve charted your course.
It’s OK if it’s difficult. It’s quite alright if you’re not strong enough. It’s actually expected that it will take you some time to get the hang of it and have the right mindset, proper focus, adequate stamina, and actual strength of mind and body before you can actually start gaining speed and advancing in the right path you set for yourself.
If you’re trying to quit a destructive habit like smoking, it’s quite alright that you fail after the first, second, third, fourth, fourth, or whatever attempt. The most important thing is that you never give up, and one day you will be strong enough to push away the addiction for good.
If you’re trying to adjust your diet and eating habits to regain your health, it’s perfectly fine if you can’t seem to keep up with this meal plan or that new diet. The most crucial part of the new change is to never give up, even if you fell off the horse you need to get back up and start again. Soon poor health will stop being an obstacle, the weight will come off, the fog will lift off your brain, your chronic conditions will get way better, and you’ll feel light of body and spirit.
If you’re trying to build a strong muscular body that will be the perfect vessel you use to navigate long years with your loved ones, you shouldn’t expect to be able to lift the biggest weight at the gym on your first attempt, perhaps doing some pushups standing against the wall at home and a 15 minutes walk are your first go-to movements.
It takes time to get ANYTHING started but once you do, it gets easier to keep going. Just remember to keep your eyes focused on the work, keep your ears closed off toward the naysayers, discouraging voices, doubts, demons, and the little negative voice in your head, and just do the things that you KNOW are right for you.
And if by any chance you look up and down and lose your foothold and find yourself where you started to begin with, just know it wasn’t all for nothing. For you have tasted the sweat nectar of forward movement, you are certain that you can get the wheels moving again, and most importantly, you are way stronger, way more powerful, with way more stamina and patience than when you first set off on this journey.
You don’t actually have to do everything “cold turkey” and expect it to work on the first try. Sometimes it does work, and it’s really glorious, but most of the time it doesn’t, and it’s perfectly fine. Don’t let it get to you.
Trust me, your next attempt is going to be easier than the one that preceded it. When you fall back to square one, you will find that the anger you feel will be enough to push you further than you could ever imagine the next time around.
Keep the faith. Take a deep breath, get back up, dust yourself off, and start climbing.
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