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Habits

【Habits】Have you ever noticed a vine growing and spiraling around a chain-link fence? The fresh growth, the young green vine, is easy to remove with a simple twist of your wrist. But the old, brown, woody part of the vine is very difficult to remove. It takes a lot of time and effort to break it off, and sometimes it won’t come off unless we are willing to also remove part of the fence itself.

Bad habits are like a vine on a chain-link fence. The sooner we get after them, the easier they are to remove. But the old ones, the ones we’ve let remain in our life for years, are hard to get rid of. And sometimes they can’t be removed unless we also remove other parts of our life.

【Habits】Bad habits are like comfortable beds: easy to get into, but hard to get out of.

【Habits】Habits have a tendency to take our like in directions we would never have chosen. Good habits can guide us through treacherous times and situations where we aren’t sure what to do and lack the foresight to realize the dangers ahead.

Bad habits are often seemingly fine at first, but they can lead us into treacherous waters. They are like a smooth river on which a young boy is floating-seemingly harmless-which then becomes swifter-very exciting-then becomes a rapids-somewhat scary-and finally goes crashing over a waterfall-devastating, possibly even fatal.

【Habits】Habits are like cable. Each day we do something in a pattern we intertwine one thread with another. As the threads are woven together, a cable is formed. On any particular day, the thread we added was too small to be noticed. But, after many threads have been woven in, we find that together they have become a practically unbreakable cable.

So it is with habits. Daily practices over time become habits that are practically unbreakable-so be careful what you weave.