Smokey would not approve

[torquill]

Akien was telling me this evening about a metaphor he had developed for the sort of headspace work that he's recently helped me (and other people) through. Say you have a meadow, he said. It has spots where the grass grows really tall, and maybe there's some patches of brambles, and it's crisscrossed with paths that are smooth and regular enough you don't even have to think about it, you just fall into the habit of following them. The more you follow certain thinking patterns, the more developed those paths are.

So you decide at some point that the paths don't go where you want them to. The first step is to put up construction barricades at the starts of those paths, to force new habits. Then you figure out where you want the new paths to go, and consciously choose them. When I fell off the edge of myself, he said, I had just wandered into the tall grass and couldn't find my way back out.

What I had been thinking, though, as soon as he laid out the metaphor, wasn't that sort of methodical approach he was describing. In my case, the paths didn't go where I wanted, and I kept running into brambles all the time, so I set that bitch on fire.

Not exactly the approach for everybody... but I'll tell you, I've had a lot fewer problems with brambles since I re-seeded it and stuff grew back. :)