Finished before it's "bearly" begun

Resolution season is but a glow in the dieing embers of the new year's festivities. By this point many will have given up on theirs. Many more will be on the threshold of pulling the plug on theirs, ready to go back to "normal" life.  Awaiting them is the security of the usual. The comfort, or at least the familiar discomfort of the day-to-day.

We are able to re-programme ourselves to live and to learn but to do so we need to embrace failure and the stultifying fear of it. Without discomfort we have little of substance to respond to, to learn from, to prompt re-wiring in the loft spaces of our minds. But like everything in life it doesn't come cheap and as it is worthwhile it will seldom come easy. And that's where the process loses the majority.

"Can you write me a new diet?"
"Sure, but that will absolutely have to go."
"Oh, I couldn't do that"


It's nonsense of course. You can. You just do not want to. And that is fine, just acknowledge that is in your power to do something about it...you are just not doing so!

And there's the thing that has come up in several conversations in several different contexts recently, not all diet related. "I want x but I'm not stopping y" or "I want x but I'm not prepared to z". Same difference. Essentially you want change (preferably dramatic) for little to no change in what you are doing/inconvenience. So you just keep ignoring the obvious fact...what you are doing is not working!

Doing something differently for a while then stopping and seeing a return to the previous set of results (or worse) tells you that your intervention was not addressing the problem. It might have dealt with a symptom but if it keeps recurring there is some other thing that is influencing it... and you have not impacted on that.

Which begs the question: are you going to try something different? Do you want the results to be different? I mean, really want the results to be different? Then you had better be prepared to let something go. No amount of sitting there clutching your lucky charm or hoping that the fickle fates will pick on somebody else is going to make a change.

It reminds me of the Winnie the Pooh. There, stuck in the hole, at first not acknowledging that he was stuck at all, just "thinking and humming to myself". And then all the discomfort is of course because the door is not big enough (and not because of what he did). When presented with a plan by Christopher Robin

"But I can't stay here"
"You can stay ere all right, silly old Bear. It's getting you out which is so difficult."

So, what's a bear like you to do?

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