A well-known fable tells us that if a frog is put into boiling water it will immediately jump out. But if the water is only gradually heated the frog will not perceive the danger and be boiled to death. The story is a warning of how a creeping normality of crisis situations deludes us into a feeling of false complacency. We fail to act until it is too late.
Our daily habits, thoughts, beliefs, and actions play a major part in determining our future. The compound effect of bad or good habits over a period of years and even decades are hugely underestimated.
The compound effect of good and bad habits
Eating for lunch a burger with French fries and a soda drink will affect your body but not harm you in a big way if you eat healthy foods most of the time and you metabolize sugars and carbohydrates with plenty of exercise. But eating mainly processed foods over years and decades will have a devastating impact on your mental and physical health in the long term.
In the same way, if your self-talk is mainly negative about yourself or if you incessantly blame others for everything that is going wrong in your life you will most probably be a grumpy, unhappy and miserable person during old age looking back on a life not lived and opportunities missed.
How often have you been buying things you don’t really need because you said: “It's only a few pennies.” But added up over years and decades you could have put aside a small fortune in savings.
Complacency is our biggest enemy
Social and political developments in the recent past should be shaking us out of our sense of complacency and nonchalance. It appears that the general social consensus on values and norms that has prevailed for most of the past decades is seriously being eroded. An independent press, non-partisan judiciary, and democratic voting procedures are seriously under threat in countries such as Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and first and foremost in the United States. If the United States is no longer the world’s best example of a working democracy authoritarian rule as we see it today in China and Russia will entrench itself in many countries.
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Deep Walking for Body, Mind and Soul
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