No B.S Friday: We are not furniture, but processes
Do you ever stop and think that you’re just carrying a boiling cauldron of acid around in your stomach?
Maybe not boiling. But it’s definitely acid.
But how does that work?
Why doesn’t that acid burn through the intestine walls and pool around your feet?
It seems like the answer to that is not because the cells of your stomach are particularly tough or anything.
They get burnt up in the acid too.
Rather, the cellular lining of the stomach is being constantly refreshed.
And it’s being refreshed at a faster rate than the acid is burning through it.
There’s a race on between the reinforcement of the cell walls, and the burn of the acid, and the stomach maintains its integrity because your cells are winning that race.
And that is why you don’t have stomach acid on your shoes.
Wild.
Humans are a process.
We tend to think of ourselves like static things. We think of the body like a building, with the brain located in this room, and the heart and the lungs located in that room, propped up there like pieces of furniture.
We imagine the heart was made and then from that point on, there was a heart. Like a cupboard or something. The cupboard was made and now you have a cupboard in your house. End of story.
But it’s not like that. Nothing is static.
Everything is a process.
I think this is helpful to remember because it helps us understand one of the great questions in life: why is change so hard?
We generally know what we need to do. If we can stop and look, we have a pretty good idea of the changes we need to make in our life.
I need to drink more water. I need to have more self-confidence. I need to get up from the computer every 20 minutes and take a break.
I need to give myself regular distance from my problems and practice gratitude and mindfulness.
I’m aware of these things. Sometimes when my life feels like it’s going off the rails I become painfully aware of these things.
But awareness alone rarely helps.
Adopting a new idea or approach into my life and my personality isn’t as simple as moving a cupboard into my house.
We feel like it should be. “I have recognised that drinking more water is important. Why isn’t that enough?”
It’s not enough because we are complex processes in action.
Ideas and beliefs are constantly being reinforced and revitalised by a brain that wants to believe that it knows what is going on.
They’re like the walls of the stomach – constantly being reinforced.
Change never comes through the recognition of an idea. It comes when we create change in our processes. It comes when we adopt new behaviours AND bolster them with self-sustaining systems.
(Am I making that sound easy? Your right. It’s not.)
But this is why change is hard. This is why it feels hard. And it’s why we can get frustrated at ourselves for having to learn the same lessons over and over again.
You might not like this. But this is the reality we’ve got.
And it’s the same reality keeping stomach acid off your shoes.
JG.