Theory and Practice

Today I am writing about the disconnect between one's habits and the habits that one knows are best. Habits are one of the most important parts of life. They, more than anything else, define the trajectory of your life. Habit is an essential part of your being. Be lazy, and your life will stagnate and decline. Be distracted, and you will not achieve your goals. Be mindless, and you will be erratic. Eat unhealthy, be unhealthy. You get what you give. You reap what you sew. In short: Karma.

I, like most mortals, have ideals. These are the projections of the ways that I do and wish to carry myself through life. I, however, seem to have trouble fulfilling the ones that I find most compellingly true. I want to know why. It is crazy that with some of my ideals, say being in excellent physical health, I barely even try. Now, I am not morbidly unhealthy by any means, but I definitely could do a lot more in the department.  Nothing makes more sense to me than to exercise and eat right. But i don't.

I think this disconnect between my practices and my beliefs has to do with my assumptions that have accompanied my development. I had an exceptionally healthy childhood. I ate right, got tons of exercise, rarely got sick and never worried about my health. Then as I started leaving my parents domain in my teens and partook in the habits of my peers. I began making unhealthy decisions. These didn't appear unheathy immediately. They were fun. Eating crappy food, drinking, smoking, and killing brain cells in general were all part of the blooming buzzing confusion of my teens. I had some misgivings about them, but generally I was caught up in the moment of being young and dumb.

Years went by and it became more and more apparent how bad decisions effect your development. I ended up reducing exercise, and gaining body fat (but never weight strangely), slowly becoming slightly depressed and wasting tons of money. But these things all happened slowly and incrementally.

The point I am getting at is that our habitual assumptions are often not in line with our actions because they are held onto unless some big contradiction arises between them and reality. When that contradiction happens gradually, it takes a lot to bring to your attention the problems at hand. I was always healthy, and kept assuming so, even though i was making unhealthy decisions. Without an intense amount of reflection upon the changes that one goes through in life, I think I would never have realized the contradiction between my "healthy" assumptions and my poor decisions. Since most people probably do not analyze their selves and their development all that much, they do not realize how much they fail to fulfill their ideals. This is (one reason) why so many people are unhealthy!

But how do you update your assumptions about yourself to make sure that you are making the best decisions you can and living as fully by your ideals as possible?

Obviously, I am not entirely sure. For starters, try to understand your history and how you got to where you are. Also make sure that your ideals are achievable. A good test for this could be asking yourself whether any reasonably normal person could achieve a certain goal. Eating healthy and exercise, for instance, or being honest for another, are things that are definitely in the realm of average human achievement. Being one of the most influential historical figures of our era, on the other hand, is not such a humanly reasonable ideal. In the end though you have to be the judge.

Finally, it is important to note that many ideals can only be achieved with the support of you immediate community. Just as, I changed my practices, and abandoned my ideal of health, as I changed into my adolescent social group, I will need to change my social group to return to my ideal of health. That is a very challenging and convoluted task. I think my next topic may be on the nature/challenge of changing social groups. Maybe this will start to provide continuity within these bloggings. (what is the name for each post? is it a "blog"? That doesn't seem right since thats the name of the whole thing. I just think "blog post" sounds awkward)