Episode 116 - Hard Habit to Make

I must apologise dear reader for it being so long since I last wrote a blog entry. It was my habit to write my blog every Sunday after Church ready to be automatically published in the late hours of Sunday night and read on Monday morning. But as time continued and life became busy, this became less a habit, and more something that I had to remember to do. And alas something I must confess that I haven’t remembered to do to in recent weeks and I am very sorry for that. But this made me ask myself a very important question; why is it that it seems that good habits are so hard to keep when bad habits seem so easy to form? And why is it so difficult to create good habits when bad habits seem so difficult to break? 

I thought about this for a long time. Probably when I should have just been writing my blog instead. It’s hard to fathom because it seems so contradictory, it seems simply to boil down to saying that good things are hard to do and bad things are easy to do. Is it really that simple? When it comes down to it, am I just naturally not a good person? Well perhaps that’s something that’s not entirely untrue but as I looked deeper I realised that actually it had much more to do with who I want to be than who I am. When I stopped to look at the focus of what I considered to be a habit, I realised that good habits and bad habits weren’t evenly matched. 

When I think of my bad habits, I think of things I naturally do, patterns of repeated behaviour that I’m inclined to follow, but that in retrospect I wish I didn’t or would like to change. But I don’t consider the good things that I naturally or easily do to be good habits, I just consider them to be normal, to be part of who I am. On the contrary, I consider good habits only to be things which I don’t naturally do, but things which I wish I did and that I want to do, and therefore try hard to make part of who I am, despite it being against my natural tendencies. And so it would seem that perhaps I am being too hard on myself. In fact it has nothing to do with being good or bad, but the simple truth that change is hard. And therefore making myself a better version of myself; a me that I’d rather be, is also hard. But then when was anything really worthwhile every easy?