Brand New Season, Brand New Day
Having survived the daylight savings time change, we are treated this weekend to the unveiling of a new season– the delightful Spring.
For me, the Spring Equinox is a refreshing and promising day. It truly marks the season for renewal and rebirth. I can’t help but apply all of those great things to personal growth.
We all have habits or aspects of our lives that we’d like to change. Perhaps we eat too much when we’re stressed out, rely on alcohol, drugs or cigarettes to cope with life, zone out on the computer or tv or any other behavior which we deem unwanted or unhealthy.
What seems like a “bad” habit to you, will undoubtedly be perceived differently by me. The point here is not to draw some line in the sand in which “these” behaviors are okay and “those” behaviors are not okay.
My intention here is to help each of us succeed in making the changes that we want to make. Because, after all, if you don’t really want to make a change you probably won’t.
So once you’ve decided that you’d like to stop doing X or start doing Y, it would be great to actually follow through and make that change a reality– perhaps even something that becomes as comfortable and customary to you as that unwanted habit once was.
Look for the green shoots among the muck. What often happens when I intend to make a change is that I start out all excited and eager to do things differently. For awhile, I am on top of that habit….and then I slip up.
Those slip ups are inevitable.
But where many of us undercut our intentions to alter our behavior in a sustainable way is in what we do AFTER the slip up.
The tendency is to really focus in on the fact that we strayed from our goal to stop a habit or adopt a new one. It’s common to notice that we’re staying away from the gym and watching hours and hours of television when that’s the one thing we promised ourselves we were going to do differently– and that slip up becomes the focal point.
We completely ignore the fact that for a particular number of days or even weeks we did actually keep to the new plan we’d created for ourselves; instead, we hone in on the one time that we didn’t. And, as they say, from there it’s all downhill back to the undesired place that we were trying so hard to move away from.
As the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron so wisely points out, “’sometimes’ is major progress.” In her book Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears, Chodron points out the way that people spotlight their “failures” on the road to changing an unwanted habit.
She talks about how we often lie in bed at the end of the day and recount all of the ways that we’ve fallen short of our goals, whether they be to stop smoking, overeating, jumping to conclusions, snapping at loved ones or something else. This is also a habit and it seems to be widespread.
When we mostly or only notice the ways that we slipped up or “failed,” we don’t acknowledge that the slip ups are only sometimes. If we could see this, we might then be able to recognize that some other times we ARE living in that new and desired way.
This is why Chodron declares that “sometimes” is major progress.
If you feel the need to assess yourself (and it seems that most of us do), be sure to look at and celebrate those green shoots and buds that are poking up through the muck of your life.
It’s absolutely just like Spring. There’s a lot of brown and drab in the aftermath of Winter, but there’s also– especially if you let yourself see it– a lot of new growth going on, peeking up through the mud and preparing to bloom.
Focus on the green shoots and buds and as you offer them your loving attention, watch yourself grow.
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Time March 20, 2010 at 8:12 pm
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