How do people lose their spouse, their faith, their grip on their values, goals, and dreams?
It doesn’t happen all at once.
It doesn’t happen overnight.
It happens through tiny shifts: a steady accumulation of daily, imperceptible deviations from one’s set course.
A little more attention is given to one thing than another.
A frame of mind bends a bit at a time in a certain direction.
A small weed of temptation pops up and is allowed to grow.
As the months and years go by, one domain in life inflates while another shrivels. Thoughts turn 180 degrees. Tangles of vice take over the garden.
A man wakes up one day and doesn’t recognize his own life. He doesn’t know how he got there. He is a stranger to his wife. A stranger to his children. A stranger to his twenty-year-old self who had ideals and a vision for who he wanted to be.
Left unchecked, every life flows away from higher aims and towards the path of least resistance. Daily practices can help stem this slide. But staying on course requires check-ins that are too big to do every day, and too important to only accomplish monthly (or yearly).
These are your weekly habits.
A weekly planning session to re-establish your agenda.
A weekly dedicated hangout to physically and mentally reconnect with your spouse.
A weekly family powwow to sync your schedules and reaffirm your values.
A weekly worship service to remind yourself you’re more than a product of nature.
A weekly walk in the woods to remember you’re also a product of nature.
Though you may zig and zag each day, weekly habits ensure you keep moving in your chosen course; there’s only so far you can get off track when you’re recalibrating your compass every seven days.
