Quit Some of My Bad Habits
I’m fixing to quit some of my bad habits.
Please observe that I said “some” and not “all” of ‘em. No, that wouldn’t do, attempting to do away with all of one’s bad habits at the same time would be a ready made recipe for failure. That would be comparable to a troop of Boy Scouts taking on a gang of Hell’s Angels. You got to take ‘em one at a time.
Some of us might not admit it, but all of us have at least one bad habit, even if it’s just cracking your knuckles or using a finger to mine for wax in your ear. Whatever the bad habit is, the more you do it and the longer you’ve been at it the tougher it’s going to be to break it.
Some of us have bad habits which in scope and degree are exceedingly more damaging to our lives that just cracking your knuckles. Knuckle cracking might get on some people’s nerves and drive them away from you, but there are far worse bad habits to be shackled to.
Take my Cousin Elroy, he had a bad habit of always being late. I mean late for everything, and it got his life in such a mess I couldn’t hardly get him out of it.
He was always late for work due to traffic, a breakdown, a wreck, a flat tire, running out of gas or some other minor catastrophe. His list of excuses were endless, but in the long run this bad habit cost him his job.
Elroy was always late getting home at night, sometimes to the extent he didn’t get home at all. But it was always due to having to work late, running into an old friend, bumping his head and acquiring temporary amnesia, or even occasionally getting car-jacked. His list of excuses were endless and greatly resourceful, but in the long run this bad habit cost him his wife.
My cousin was always late meeting the deadlines of the ordinary responsibilities of life such as paying his rent, his car payment, his utilities and certain other court-ordered fines and fees. This bad habit cost him an endless amount of grief by being dispossessed of shelter and transportation and finally, incarceration.
After some scientific research I discovered a three-step method for breaking bad habits, which I decided to apply to my cousin’s desperate case.
First off, you had to figure out why you behave in a certain way, the circumstances surrounding the timing of your behavior, and lastly, to find a replacement for this bad habit.
When I presented this formula to Elroy, he said that the reason why he was always late for work was because he didn’t want to be there and that the reason he was always late coming home was because he enjoyed being somewhere else more than being there and that the reason he was always late paying his debts was because he had rather have the money in his pocket instead of having it in somebody else’s.
As far as finding some kind of productive activity to replace his bad habit, he said he thought a few months of staying with an old friend down on the Gulf Coast would clear everything up and make him a better person. Without waiting for anyone else’s opinion on the matter, he headed south.
Since I had been so effective in helping Elroy with his bad habit, I figured it was time to turn my attention to one of my own, which was the habit of taking a nap at the same time everyday, no matter where I was or who I was with, or the surrounding circumstances.
This bad habit had caused me to doze off in church, in the middle of conversations, and most damaging, it sometimes happened just before the end of a ball game or a great movie, depriving me of the joy of observing how they ended up.
I was beginning to put together my own three-step plan, the one that had worked so well on my cousin, to enable me to break my own bad habit of napping, but I noticed what time of day it was and I’m fixing to doze off.