We repeat patterns. We get those old neural pathways ingrained in our grey matter and the synapses just keep firing over and over again, sending us down the same roads, inflicting us with the same feelings and habits until they're all we know.



That's why change frightens us. It resets those neural pathways, creates more of them, restructures how we think and feel. Change can often be a good thing, but Fear that change won't be good, well, that's why we hold on to the bad things, repeat bad habits. Plus treading those old neural pathways feels good, is pleasurable, even. The familiar just feels 'right'.



Even when it's not.



Sometimes we're no different from those poor carriage
horses who have blinders on––they just move forward without thought or context, someone/something
else guiding their path. That's what happens to us when we get set in our ways and take the easy road that feels familiar––when we should take the hard road, the one that will make us grow.



Robert Frost had it right in The Road Not Taken.



Today I had one of those neural pathway moments. It was not good. My expectations were such that I went right to that bad place in my mind––a place created by years of one, particular kind of experience. When I realized where I had gone, and how my brain had craved the bad, suspicious feelings...it made me cry.



I don't want to be the person who has those thoughts anymore––and besides, no one deserves to wear a yoke placed in your hands by the actions of someone else.