Mental Habitrails

You remember Habitrails. Transparent modular tubes form a structure, (a habitat, hence the name) for hamsters to move through. We make our own mental ones, and we move through them over and over until they start closing in and we go nuts. Then we do something, anything, to break free--- before jumping right back in to begin again.

Where are you in that cycle? This isn’t rhetorical, please stop and think about it. Maybe you can predict what the people you see every day are about to say. I can do that with about half of the folks in my gym.

When you get an email, can you tell what it will be based on who sent it? Or perhaps you work with someone who will always tell you first how great your stuff is, then how you should change it all. You know it’s coming, because life is a Habitrail, and you’ve been there before.

But then it happens. Someone surprises you. The obnoxiously un-funny lout (of either gender) says something insightful or genuinely amusing. The person who you thought wasn’t listening not only responds, but gives you a new perspective on what you were thinking. It’s the third line of the haiku, the one that twists the whole and bestows meaning. Habits are made to be broken, even and especially mental ones.

Habitrails to you, until we meet again.