Posts made in January, 2012

Doing It Afraid 6: Repentance

Posted on 12 Jan 2012 | 0 comments

“Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.”
― Albert Einstein

This blog is actually more of a reflection on this blog by Julien Smith called “The Complete Guide to Snapping the @#$% Out of It”

Most of us, when we think of repentance have some mental image which involves groveling, crying out, confessing horrific deeds.

And the New Year is normally the world-side season of this kind of repentance.

We talk about all our bad habits, our not-so-great habits, and the habits that we wish we had. We talk about eating right, exercising more, quitting smoking, reading more books, etc etc etc. And most of the time we really mean it. Even if we’re not people of faith, we normally see the New Year as an opportunity to start over, to start from scratch. But the point that Julien makes that I really love is that we never actually do just that.

We never actually START OVER. We don’t START from SCRATCH.

We think that if we just do our previously established failed behaviors ‘just a little bit harder’ – that will somehow *this time* translate into different results. And if we agree with Einstein (which I do), that’s insanity.