Swimming Upstream

Momentum is everything

A proclamation is one thing, execution is another. I intended to write about hydration in this post as per my plan from last night, but I ended up jumping my own 5:30 AM target by a good half hour today. I seem to remember, in broken frames, having hit the snooze button on my phone in my stupor. Suffice it to say, then, that this post isn’t about hydration, but about something more pressing.

It is incredible how a fully sentient human being with enormous ability to think, reason and act, when semi-conscious, is reduced to a limp puppet that can be easily manipulated. Sloth (not the mammal) is a particularly dangerous adversary — made all the more powerful by negative habits accumulated over many years. Even the best steeled will isn’t arsenal enough to wipe out, at once, the collective tendencies that have taken control.

Change is entirely dependent on momentum

Metaphors abound in this context— the idea of chipping away at a monumental task, a little at a time, until the desired outcome is ultimately achieved is not new. Change is entirely dependent on momentum. To stop, from a stationary position, a heavy body that is in motion, and has been so for a long time, takes some amount of being pushed back. Laws of physics, duh!

At the outset, changing hard set habits is hard. My mind is turbulent with negative currents. Even hardened swimmers will tell you that swimming upstream is a tall order. It takes all but a moment of inaction for the flow to pull you in the opposite direction. The thing to do, then, is to not give up and to carry on. To still my mind, I need to counter the momentum of the flow with my own. One step at a time — getting stronger with each step taken. So, here I am, half an hour behind, yet many steps ahead.

Do let me know how you’ve changed a deep rooted negative habit in your lives.