Many feel due to a sense of something within or around not fitting right, not feeling as if it works, in the true sense of the word, compelled to seek out a range of potential solutions to a problem that they might struggle to even comprehend, let alone elucidate.
This could be something like a change of diet, philosophical belief system, physical exercises, mental gymnastics, new spiritual paradigm, or a combination of these and more.
The compulsion to experiment and dial in what works is the need that the endless parade of sameish and occasionally legitimate self help books leverage to go on existing. It goes some way to explaining fad diets, gurus, systems, techniques, and other windows into a promised denser set of understandings about the fundamentals of human nature.
While through sheer weight of numbers the majority turn out to be bunk, ineffective, or just not a great fit in that time and place, very occasionally something resonates. When that clicking into place occurs, a shift is tangibly evident. A notch closer to synergy with the perception of how life should feel, but previously hasn’t.
The insight I have here is that despite knowing at all levels of their being that their situation has improved, some people grow acclimatised to this new state of affairs, and begin losing the discipline to stick with it. They drift back into old habits, and minimise or abandon the thing that previously helped.
It seems to me that once the way has revealed itself to you, if you choose not to follow it, things become even more difficult than before. In as much as the universe brought you and everything necessary into the same appropriate space at the right time, we’re encouraged to return to the necessary path by a greater sense of the juxtaposition between the way and not the way.
This isn’t a notion that I came up with myself, I read something similar in one of Dan Millman’s books years ago, and occasionally that thought has come back to me as I try to justify the small compromises in good habits that lead to the slippery slope back into old ones.
What’s novel and now evident to me about the concept is just how broadly it can be applied, from grand philosophical ways of living to the more mundane aspects of fitness and housekeeping.