About four weeks ago, when I had just arrived in Palau, I sharedsome thoughts about habits, breaking old ones and making new ones. My thoughts were precipitated by  driving a right hand drive automobile. I shared with you that I had read that it takes about six weeks to establish a new habit. That’s what I’ve read. How has it worked out, though?
I will now go several days, maybe a week, without stepping up to the left side of the car to get in and drive. I generally still think about it, though. I almost never turn the wipers on when trying to signal a turn. Most importantly, I haven’t run over anybody or anything. But it still feels weird to drive from the right side of the car.
The process is serving as a warning and a powerful lesson to me. Here is a pattern of behavior that is not driven by desire, profit, or self-interest. It is just a pattern reinforced at least 35,000 times over fifty years of life. I want to break it, or not be bound by it; I’m totally neutral about left or right, yet “Get in the left side.” still dominates parts of my mind. I need to be really, really careful about the habits that I allow to be formed in my life. Just a simple pattern, repeated over years, exerts a powerful influence. When that pattern is reinforced by one of the lusts that pervades our life—“the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life” (1 John 2:16)—the hold becomes all the more powerful. If addiction is involved the habit becomes a strangle hold—often tragically literally so.
Solomon counselled the young to “Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth” (Ecclesiastes 12:1). The patterns and habits that will shape our lives are built then. Right now each of us is as young as she or he will ever be.
It’s STTA. |
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