Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily. Yesterday, we spoke about the concept, from the Elder of Kelm, that a person naturally reverts to his preconceived notions. There’s a beautiful mashal/ metaphor that explains how this works, by comparing the neural pathways in our brain to sled or ski tracks down a snowy hill.
· When you first start sledding, there are many possible paths you can take down to the bottom, but over time, the activity of sledding creates tracks. The more you use a certain path, the deeper that track becomes. Certain tracks become really speedy and very efficient at guiding the sled down the hill, so you're much more likely to take those pathways in the future.
This is a powerful metaphor for explaining many of the habitual, dysfunctional patterns in our lives.
At one time or another, most of us have had the experience of being stuck in a rut, feeling like we're doing the same thing over and over again, whether it's in our work, in our personal relationships, or just in our own thinking. In neurological terms, that rut is a pathway that has been repeatedly strengthened and reinforced until it becomes quite difficult to starting acting differently.
This mashal is powerful, because it explains why we keep reverting back to our previous habits- it’s because those habits are just easier. They've been created by constantly repeating the same path. But with work, just like the person sledding or skiing can change his path to create new pathways in skiing, we can create new pathways in our brains. But it takes time, and constant repetition, to undo the previous ways in which we think.
And it’s not just about the way we think. Its not just about mindsets, like in the case of Yosef and the brothers, or like in today’s day and age, of looking at the world through the lens of random events, rather than through the lens of God’s supervision.
This also applies to our habits. People are chronically late, people are argumentative, people have an aggressive streak.
All of these tendencies occur because those pathways in our brain have been repeated so many times that they becomes automatic.
Rav Yerucham Levovitz compares this to somebody that's writing with a light- colored pencil. He goes back and forth with the pencil, again and again and again, and that vague imprint eventually becomes darker and darker, even though initially, he couldn’t see anything.
This is important in our mashal as well. When you're trying to change, going down that new pathway, you're not going to see such an indentation in the snow. But as you keep on going over that indentation, it gets deeper and deeper.
And eventually, in our nimshal as well, things will change. But it’s important to know that we don't always see the change so fast, because, like we said, we naturally revert back to the original position that we took. However, if we stick to the task, eventually we'll create new pathways, and we will actually be able to change the way we think and the way we act.