One of the hardest things to do is change your mind. Not about one particular thing or one particular opinion, but actually change it. Change how it functions. Change how it perceives things, change the assumptions it uses, change the habits it’s built as shortcuts, change the hardwired foundational pieces which we lean on to support us. The mind is amazingly elastic and yet one of the things it does best is find efficient ways to work. When it finds something it likes and that seems to solve a problem, it’s all over it.
We see this in moochers. It takes energy to constantly be asking for money, dodging debts, and need to depend on others, but the mind found that this process resolves larger issues efficiently, burying fears, keeping bigger problems smothered, and so it uses mooching as the goto. And that pattern will show up all over in the person’s life from the macro to the micro because we’re pretty fractal that way. The brain finds something that works, it’s going to use the heck out of that solution. That’s getting all the bang you can out of the buck as well as living symbolically and making sure that when you’re ready to see the forest for the trees, you’ll see it everywhere you look, in everything you do. Elegant in such a functional way.
Changing those habits, really changing your mind takes commitment. It requires a dawning awareness that these changes will unfold in phases, that it’s not one-and-done, that there will be revelations and unpleasantness along the way, but the rewards are stupendous. The rewards are life saving and life affirming. We are the reward we’re seeking to receive and we’re in there, locked in side. If we could just change one thing…