Are Habits Preventing You from Living Fully? Carpe Diem!
Be not simply good – be good for something. –Henry David Thoreau
In the middle of a High School poetry class, the teacher leaped ontohis desk, stood towering close to the ceiling, and looked into the faces of hisastounded students. The boys gazed up at him, astonished. They keenly awaitedan explanation.
“I stand upon my desk to remind myself that we must constantly look atlife in a different way,” he thundered. “You see, the world looks very differentfrom up here.”
The students raised quizzical eyebrows and glanced at each other withwry smiles.
“You don’t believe me? Come see for yourselves,” the teacher invited.He beckoned for the boys to join him atop the desk at the front of the classroom.
“Come on! Come on!” he urged as the boys scrambled onto the desk, twoby two. Each pair would scan the classroom from the new vantage point for a fewseconds and hop down to make room for their classmates.
If you have watched it, you may recognize this as a scene from the1989 movie, The Dead Poets’ Society, starring Robin Williams as thepoetry teacher who urges his students: “Carpe Diem! Seize the day! Make yourlives extraordinary.” The results are life-changing.
Do you believe that your life is extraordinary? Or like you have theability to make it exceptional? It’s one thing to know what we want to achieve,or even what we want to stop doing; but sometimes we’re just so stuck in oldhabits, we might as well be swimming in quicksand. The things we wish we couldstop doing – the things that stop us from achieving our best – are often thevery ones we seem powerless to break away from.
Do you spend ridiculous amounts of time on social media or watching TV?Or do you sleep late, wake up late, and get late to work or appointments? Perhapsthe habit is eating too much junk food, or just eating too much. It could evenbe a struggle with speaking the truth. Whatever the habit that’s holding youback, you’ve probably tried and failed to kick it at least a couple of times.Sometimes it’s actually a habit you’re trying to pick up, like exercising,reading, or saving money.
A new a vantage point may be what you need to look at your life from a different perspective. So, rather than be a couch potato who’s trying to get some exercise, envision how happy you would be hiking or biking with friends. Instead of someone who struggles to get up early to be on time for work, see how elated you would be jumping out of bed when you turn the hobby you love into what you do for a living. Instead of someone stuck in the same situation because you postpone your goals for fear of failure, imagine a more resilient self with the mental fortitude that success requires.
Though old habits may be difficult to break, and healthy habits hard to develop, I have good news for you: it’s possible to form, and maintain, new positive habits. The secret is in ‘repetition’ – practice, practice, practice.
Carpe diem! Seize the day. Don’t aim at just being good; be good for a purpose. If you can envision your purpose – that which will make your life extraordinary – and aim for that, you might find that the old habits fall away and the good ones become part of your life without much effort.
Copyright ©2020 by David Waweru. Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.