Once in a Row

Once in a Row

Little changes are hard to see but they make all the difference.

This statement is true, but it can work for or against you. Healing takes time, and it takes steady work over a lifetime to build and keep great health. But making disease takes time, too–Type II diabetes and cancer and heart disease don’t happen overnight.

Healing or harming, it’s all a long, slow process. And in that time frame lies the problem. Human beings are experiential in nature. We need to feel a cause and effect. And that makes health care—and disease creation—a tricky process, because in most of the things we do everyday, there’s little positive or negative feedback.

Tiny amounts of negative feedback aren’t often “loud” enough to notice, and over years we end up with the wrong kind of momentum. We become like a health Titanic, unable to turn the ship in time to avoid the iceberg of a heart attack, a cancer diagnosis, a kidney failure, or lung disease.

Smoking a single cigarette, or drinking one can of soda might not make a noticeable change for the negative so why not another? Likewise, NOT smoking one or NOT drinking one doesn’t feel much different either.

So one doesn’t really matter, does it?

But of course it does. The little things we choose to do everyday create our habits. And our habits create our long term health. So when you choose once, ask yourself if it’s really once…or once in a row.