“Old habits die hard” so the saying goes – but not all habits are bad. Most are good.
And in our quest for improvement sometimes we have to challenge a good habit and replace it with an even better one. And doing that is tough – much tougher than challenging a bad habit.
Sometimes the challenge to our comfort zone comes from Reality. We suddenly lose something very dear to us that has become such an integral and important part of our lives that when it is taken away we feel the acute pain of loss. We are left with an open emotional wound and we have to give ourselves time and space to recover and to heal.
With the clarity of hindsight we can see that we knew all along what would happen – we just did not know when it would happen – and we were in a state of hope-for-the-best-for-now. After all, why suffer the perpetual pain of worry when the outcome is inevitable? Well, it may be inevitable but it does not mean it needs to be imminent! So a healthy dose of anxiety is OK. Complacency is the precursor to a catastrophe and most of our catastrophes are preventable. Keeping busy doing what we have always done is not an effective strategy for warding off a preventable catastrophe.
A more effective strategy is to worry just enough to keep our complacency level low and to keep us alert to threats because in averting these we are forced to challenge ourselves and in doing that we discover hidden opportunities.
The outcome is renewal.
Sometimes though we have to learn the lessons of life the hard way.