It’s been 4 months since the new year. Most of us must have taken resolutions. So, how is that working out? For my part, it didn’t even last for a week. I am not ashamed though, that I usually set goals and never keep up with them. After a while, quotes like “Work smart, not hard” start popping into my conscience or out of the blue a top priority work gets dumped into my already cluttered schedule that makes me quit the change I wanted to make. The question to be addressed is, why is it so hard to make a change?
Of course, growing up we were always told that we are responsible to bring a change to our world. The same thing was told to our parents and will be told to our children. How can we possibly change the world when we are so incompetent when it comes to changing ourselves. To answer in plain language-” That’s just how the universe works”. It’s called the paradox of change.
There exists an equilibrium in everything. It is called “homeostasis”. For instance, when it’s too hot it’ll always rain to cool down the Earth. When your blood pressure is low, your heart starts pumping faster to level the pressure. Some of us can study only at certain hours or eat specific food. This is because over time we have developed our do’s and don’ts and they become our equilibrium. Straying away from the equilibrium causes problems. Like when an athlete trains too hard, he ends up being injured or when we study harder, we tend to fall sick.
There is no such thing as overnight success. It requires a radical change that is almost impossible for the human body to achieve. The sole purpose of life is to maintain stability. And when we cross that invisible line, all the forces in our life will bring us back to our equilibrium. That is why we face a dead-end when we try something new. Quoting George Leonard “Resistance is proportionate to the size and speed of change, not to whether the change is a favourable or unfavorable one”.
No matter whether we are trying to change for good or bad, resistance is always present. And, the faster you try to change the faster you will slide back to where you started.
The secret to maintaining the change is to focus on 1% of the improvement. To make the change in small parts so that it’s hardly noticeable by our body until it becomes a part of our equilibrium. Yes, change does take a long time and it’s called the optimum rate of growth. To move forward we have to work with the forces in our life and not against them.
