My mother had a great analogy for me today.

She compared the process (or attempted process) of changing habitual actions in life to a scenario where you’re continually getting hit on the thumb with a hammer.

Sounds painful, right?  Well it is.

But how many times in life do we continue to do painful things, in spite of seemingly obvious (and painless) solutions?  More importantly, why do we continue down our habitual paths?

A lot of it has to do with our individual “structural” histories – our internal structures, our personalities (which are manifest in our flesh, by the way) – and what those structures allow or do not allow us to think, feel, or do.  This is speaking from a “systems” perspective.  The rules that apply to systems apply to this scenario.  Systems are resistant to change.  More on systems in a later post.

When your personal history (which is your “structure”) has no context showing you that it’s possible to move your thumb out of the way of the repetitively descending hammer, there it sits, getting smashed every time the hammer comes down.

It seems strange to me, but the truth is that something has to intervene at this point.  Something has to show you that it’s possible to move your thumb.

Not only that, but frequently, something (and it could be the same something, or a different something) often has also to show you how to move it!

What happens next is odd to me, as well.  Because at this point, you have to muster up the determination actually to try the new thing.  It doesn’t happen just because something showed you it was possible, and then something (else) showed you how to do it.  You have to make an effort and actually try it.

And that effort is not small.  Even for the tiniest action (like moving your thumb), and even in a situation where all you can do is gain from the action (you aren’t going to get the thumb chopped off if you move it out of the path of the hammer in this scenario, you’ll just risk not feeling pain), the effort to do something different, with unknown consequences, is ENORMOUS.

This fact of nature is the mother of the phrase – “Better the devil you know, than the devil you don’t.”

It’s easier to stick with bad, destructive habits, than it is to change.

But why would nature do this to us?