Day 633: Losing Track of Yourself

In this last week I have been unable to write my blog every day for a number of reasons. What is interesting is how difficult something like this becomes to pick it up again. The same can be said for waking up a bit later for a few mornings and then going back to waking up earlier. It seems like once you break your routine, or flow, it becomes more difficult picking it up again than it was in the very beginning.

This happens to many people - it's probably happened to you at least once in your life where something that came as easily as breathing turns into a big bad negative experience as soon as you break your routine. All of a sudden you start having all sorts of thoughts explaining exactly why you can't, or don't have to, do this thing you used to do so well and freely. It can be so easy to listen to those thoughts, to give them validity and drift away into complacent justification.

In those moments that you give credence to these thoughts you lose a little bit of yourself, you lose your will and your power to direct your life. You don't lose it for good - it's more like you lock it away in a little box and throw the key away - you can still open the box, but it will take more then the turn of a key. It now is that much harder to get that piece of yourself back, so most of the time you hang onto those thoughts telling you that what you're doing is OK, that you're still the same you you were before, you've just made different choices. In truth, the only choice you made was to believe your thoughts that were telling you why you didn't have to follow through with your previous choices.

After all this you create some very good reasons for how you got to where you are now, but there's a little nagging feeling inside you that is telling you that you're not being honest with yourself, that by allowing yourself to fall under the spell of thoughts and justifications, you are diminishing yourself and gradually becoming less than what you once were.

The question is: what would you do if those thoughts were no longer there? How much easier would it be to pick something up again after pausing for a moment (whatever the reason may be)? Is it the thoughts making you believe that it is so much more difficult to start again? How would you feel and act without the thoughts? Would there still be a hesitation if you perceived the task ahead of you to be mandatory, unavoidable and important?

So what's the difference between apparent "freedom of choice" and necessity that makes some things easier to do than others? Should the choice to justify inaction or avoidance be called freedom of choice in that you are choosing to avoid your responsibilities - to yourself and to any other person or being involved? What good is freedom of choice when so few have the self discipline to actually follow through on (especially difficult) choices and commitments.

This discussion can be applied to all areas of life: diet, relationships, family, work, play, hobbies, etc. The moral of the story is this: There are many things in life that we make more difficult than they actually are, so many things that we could be doing and so many ways in which we could be growing - but we allow something as small and incorporeal as a thought to dictate what we will and will not do, all the while telling ourselves that there's a good reason.