Over the Christmas and New Year break I managed to get into the garden and do some major clearing work. (A perfect activity for burning off all those excess calories consumed at Christmas!)
There were some areas of the garden that I just needed to do a light clearing as I had only recently done some maintenance. But there were other sections of the garden that took a great amount of effort to clear. I found that in the sections where I hadn’t done any maintenance for some time, the weeds were really well established and took a fair bit of focussed effort to remove.
And that got me thinking.
Our lives, our thinking, and our patterns of behaviour work the same way.
When we have areas in our life that we pay attention to and address regularly, we seldom see problems arising. But those other areas that we avoid – our negative thinking patterns, our self-criticism, our pessimistic view of other people or the world, or even our physical habits of not exercising or making poor food choices – if we haven’t been vigilant in catching ourselves in those patterns and addressing them, well, those patterns can become so entrenched that the task of finally dealing with them requires a lot of time and effort.
But just like the weeds, if we simply address issues at the time they arise, then we can avoid overwhelm.
Think about it. If you catch yourself griping and complaining, you can stop it then and there. But if you make excuses or ignore that behaviour, over time, you’ll become known as the person who gripes and complains.
If you get into the habit of sleeping in rather than getting up to exercise, well, what happens over time? You get so unfit that it can be too overwhelming to even try to get back into exercising.
There’s an old gardener’s saying:
Nip it in the bud!
And it makes sense.
Pulling out weeds as soon as they appear will stop them from establishing themselves, spreading and taking over the entire garden.
And just like with garden weeds, we need to regularly and frequently pull the weeds out of the thinking and behaviour patterns that don’t serve us before they can take root, spread and entrench themselves into our lives.
Happy gardening!
