Let me begin with a story. This fellow was not very good with directions. North, South, East and West, was all one big jumble. One day, he needed to go south, and asked what train he should take. Unfortunately he went on to the North train.
About a half hour into the trip it occurs to him the scenery looks very different, so he asks someone where the train is heading. He was told he was heading north when he needed to be going south. The fellow motioned to him, instead of where the train is heading, he needs to go the other way, in the opposite direction.
The lost fellow immediately picked up his belongings and started running in the train down the corridors to the back of the train. As he zoomed by the sitting passengers, they became alarmed and thought there was some threat at the front of the train. People asked him what’s happening? He explained that he was going in the wrong direction, so now he is running in the train, in the direction he was told he should be going.
Everyone of course laughed at him. They told him, he needed to get off this train and head in the opposite direction, on a totally different train going in the correct direction.
In life, there are times when we realize, we need to change the direction we are going in. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a global large-scale transformation of who we are, and what we are doing. It may be one specific area, like addressing our finances, health or our spiritual state of affairs.
Let’s say someone decides he needs more money in his house. So he tries to find a better paying job, or ways to augment his current income while at the same time he continues being a spend thrift and waste money on unimportant acquisitions.
This kind of behavior would be similar to our traveling fellow, who while making an effort to change where he is heading, he is still basically on the same path that is taking him not where he needs or wants to go.
The lose weight industry will forever be making money as long as they sell you the impossibility of eat as you please, and lose weight. If a person truly wants to loose weight, he must get off entirely the frame of mind he now has, regarding food and its’ consumption. It is not possible to eat and not be conscientious of calories, and lose weights at the same time.
If and when a person realizes the transitory nature of life, the superficiality of materialism and decides he wants to live a life that taps in to something that is timeless and reaches deeper than the culture of “skin deep”, a serious change of trains is in order.
As the saying goes, you can’t be a little pregnant. Either you are or you aren’t, and this takes a serious commitment. A person must be honest, totally honest with themselves, which to be very honest isn’t always that easy, where they find themselves at any given time that they decide it’s time for a self assessment, and where they would like to be.
If you don’t know where you’re going it’s unlikely you’ll ever get there, but that’s already another topic.