I don’t agree with Leo Tolstoy when he said, “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
Why? Because I don’t think that everyone thinks of changing the world, and many people think of changing themselves.
I do agree, as he is implying, that in order for change in the world to come about, it is the man-in-the-mirror that must change first.
But how?
I was updating a page on my website, but no matter what I did, the changes would not show up on the page. It remained stuck in the past. Finally, I realized that it was somehow connected to a page that I had put into the trash.
You’d think that would be enough to disconnect it, but it wasn’t. I had to actually empty the trash to break the connection. At that point, all the changes I had made became visible.
Isn’t that so like what we do in our lives? We think we have thrown away old habits, ideas, thoughts, and emotions, but really, they are just sitting there in a trashcan somewhere holding up progress.
In order for change to be visible, we have to be willing to empty the trash.
It’s all about habits. I love habits. Habits are the basis of everything we do, otherwise imagine how chaotic life would be.
It’s not having a habit that is the problem; it is the holding on to unwanted and outgrown habits, which can range from simply not useful, to dangerous.
To make habits our servant, rather than being servants of habit, we have to be willing to discard an outgrown habit for a new one.