What and Who Are You Living For?

There is a point at which everything becomes simple and there is no longer any question of choice, because all you have staked will be lost if you look back. Life’s point of no return.

-Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings

I became much more serious about my strength and conditioning when my grandchildren were born. I INTEND to be the kind of grandmother that is as strong as I can be for as long as I can be with them. I like going to trampoline parks with them and actually participating in their shenanigans. What about you? What are you living FOR that inspires you to let go of the habits that no longer serve you well?

Cost/Benefit Analysis

Any habit that we have developed has perceived benefits - even the ones that turn on us. No one ever gets addicted to carrots. Example: If I discover during the course of my recovery work that one of my shortcomings is dishonesty, I need to ask how has this served me?

When I was a kid, telling my folks what they wanted to hear acted as a form of protection from conversations I did NOT want to have - we were not that great at dealing with conflict or conversations in general. One of the ways dishonesty showed up for me was defensive behaviors. People don’t mess as much with the feisty kid who refuses to listen to name calling. If my dad was going to call me stupid, then he was going to have to put up with me defending my intelligence for at least 20 minutes. Honesty in the situation would have required me to talk with someone about how afraid I was that my dad might be right. Maybe I was stupid.

What habits do you have that are no longer serving you well but you are still using? It’s helpful to acknowledge how they once served a purpose. It makes it a tiny bit easier to let them go!

Grief and Loss

But then one regrets the loss even of one’s worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one’s personality.

- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray[4]

People who study the art of change say that within us lies a lot of ambivalence, even about things we desperately desire to change. This ambivalence is housed in our brain and it makes total sense that our brain would hate change.

The human brain is an amazingly complex organ, but it has one thing in common with my grandfather Bill Murdock. It loves to sit on the porch and smoke a good cigar. The brain loves patterns. It does not much care if its understanding of patterns is actually accurate. It loves to find patterns so that it can take more smoke breaks.

Patterns give the brain the opportunity to go on auto-pilot and catch its breath. My husband, who works from home, sometimes ends up at the gym instead of a scheduled afternoon meeting because he is in the habit of going to the gym in the afternoon as a work break.

If I come home late after a rough day, my brain wants a spoon and a jar of peanut butter because my brain believes that eating peanut butter out of a jar is a wonderful way to deal with stress. It’s paired stress and eating peanut butter and believes it is a pattern my whole being should embrace. But my healthy eating intentions do NOT embrace eating a jar of peanut butter as an after dinner snack. Who wins?

If it is easy and convenient and within reach, the peanut butter wins. My brain is ambivalent about making changes. It liked the old way of dealing with stress it does NOT want to learn new things.

But my brain does not get the final say! Understanding that change is hard and my brain will fight my good intentions at every turn, the peanut butter had to go. Peanut butter is not a bad thing. In fact, it is quite yummy. But I am having to break a bad habit for a good reason.

My brain and I regret the banishment of my little friend peanut butter, but he had to go for a higher purpose.

What do you need to let go of in order to set yourself for transformation? Although we humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings and all that heavy lifting is on him, we still have a part to play in the work of change! What’s yours?

No More Excuses

You have led me from my bondage and set me free By all those roads, by all those loving means. That lay within your power and charity.

-Dante Alighieri, Paradiso

Step Seven - humbling asking God to remove our shortcomings - does not waste our time with theories or theology. It provides a plan of action driven by spiritual principles. These principles include: honesty, truth telling about ourselves, accepting personal responsibility, making wrongs as right as we can, and trusting God, not only to support the process but to carry the heaviest of the load.

In fact, the ONLY thing suggested to us in this step is for us to ASK. The rub is in the HOW of asking (humbly) and in the WHAT we are asking God to do for us (remove our shortcomings). Make no mistake - the heavy lifting is done by God, not us. And it is his great pleasure to do so.

Meditation Moment

What would be hard about living a life characterized by humility?

What would be the benefits?

Take a few minutes to sit and ponder, ask God to give you wisdom.