Habits – and Cats

Sometimes old habits – and old thoughts – can be hard to escape from.

Visualize them as a cat you don’t really want to know that keeps scratching at your door, begging to be let in. It seems so pathetic, so pitiful, that we sometimes give in and allow it to take up residence in our life. We think we can ask it to leave, but really, each day it stays it gets a little harder to evict. It chews the furniture, our shoes, and yowls in the middle of the night. It upsets the other cats, who were quite contented until now.

So think of it this way: this cat is not happy with you. It really doesn’t want to destroy your house. It just does it because it’s feeling bad about itself. That’s the time to let it go and find another owner. And you know what? Since it’s a cat, it will do just that. Oh, it’ll hang around for a while and try and make us feel guilty, but we’ll have to be firm. In the end it’ll be better for us both.

Our old habits and patterns are, sometimes, just like cats.