I find it crazy how much of our days are dictated by our habits. They are the building blocks of our daily routines, so while our conscious minds plan our days’ main events, our habits fill in the gaps. It’s ideal, then, that if we want good days, we should form good habits, because we can only control so many of our actions in a day.
But it’s never as easy as simply doing a desired behavior everyday for the next 21 days. In fact, 21 days is minimum. Plus, there are other factors to consider, like our mood, the weather, schedule changes, drastic routine changes, vacation, fatigue.
Recently, I’ve been attempting to form two new habits: being mindful through meditation and writing. Everyday for the past 10 days, I’ve been spending 10 minutes on headspace, and written everyday or so as well. The problem is, it only takes one day to ruin the habit. For the past month, I’ve skipped quite a number of days of writing and last weekend, I’ve skipped meditation as well. And when that happens, progress almost goes all the way back to zero, back to the foot of the mountain.
Although the climb up is a through a familiar trail and even though we’re wiser and more experienced from the get-go, ground zero is still ground zero. The climb starts now.