William James talks of the Laws of Habit. Napoleon Hill talks of Cosmic Habitforce. I talk of The Habit Code. They all try to explain the natural course of action of LIVING and even inanimate things within the universe.
It is very important that we realize the importance that habit plays within our lives. Take for example the act of walking. It takes a human baby nigh on four months to go from a crawling state, to a walking state and then several more months (even longer) to finally perfect the act of walking.
During the learning stage the bedding down of neural pathways within the brain produce a range of movement and cause electrical activity within thousands of muscle fibres. The accurate timing for each nerve firing is embedded in the brain through repetition.It then needs only the initial thought of walking to trigger the nerve firings to cause your legs to move and feedback to tell you where your leg needs to move several times a second.
It is amazing when you think about it.
If your brain had to calculate how to walk everytime you needed to it would have no time to calculate anything else, never mind running all your other autonomous tasks like making your heart beat faster, or even the blinking of an eye.
The following passage ‘The Laws of Habit’ is taken in part from ‘Talks to Teachers’ by William James.
We speak, it is true, of Good habits and Bad habits, but, when people use the word ‘ habit’ in the majority of instances it is a bad habit which they have in mind. They talk of a smoking habit and the swearing habit or the drinking habit. They never speak of the abstention habit or the moderation habit or the courage habit. But the fact is that our virtues are habits as much as our vices. All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits, – practical, emotional, and intellectual, – systematically organized for our weal (prosperity) or woe (suffering), and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be.
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