You know what is hard? Calculus. It involves numbers, symbols, letters, strategies and formulas. You can't learn it overnight and I assure you if you try the night before an exam it won't end up being a very good day for you. Calculus takes time, commitment, attention, and a little bit of spark for that "ah ha" moment to ring in your head. Once you have it down, you feel confident and all the new challenges that come along with problems and solutions just makes sense and they become easier to work out because you took the steps to actually understand it. You can't learn multiplication and division without addition and subtraction. You just can't. You can't skip those fundamental steps and still learn what it is that you are trying to accomplish.
That is why we are missing the big picture. Calculus is hard, but so is life. So, if we can't skip steps in math then how does it make sense to skip steps which are critical for our wellbeing. We forget to sleep a normal amount, eat healthy, drink water, and occasionally to just stop and breathe. Then we spend 8-12 hours a day working or worrying and exhausting our bodies until we get sick. It is because we skipped the steps.
Don't get me wrong, I am notorious for overloading my workload. For anyone who knows me, I love to stay busy and crave the adrenaline rush from a deadline. I am blessed to do what I love all day every day from my job to my educational career and that is rare, especially for someone my age. So, I take full advantage and say yes to every opportunity, right? I am supposed to always keep myself busy so that I get everything done right? Sleep isn't that important right? A year ago, I would have agreed with all those statements but today I sit before this laptop and can only think, "what the heck is wrong with me".
See when you are in the zone, you never want to get out, and you avoid all the signals that you are passing by. It is like speeding down a freeway going 300 mph and you can't pay attention to anything else around you, so you avoid all the "Danger Ahead" signs which are literally spelled out in front of you. We pass by the signs because we think that they will slow us down but in reality, they will help us avoid the destruction we are setting ourselves up for.
I have been so in tune with my work that I will go days without eating, without drinking anything, without sleeping, and I won't even realize until I am passed out on my computer and wake up to my stomach summoning me. We have all done it before. Maybe not to the extent I have let myself get to, but everyone has at some point pushed themselves to exhaustion that they try to pick up the pieces when it is too late.
Gaining weight is the best example where people will complain while continuing to put junk into their bodies until they freak out and go on a diet and over exercise since they didn't balance it out all along. We go from one extreme to the other and that is when our body is in shock and rejects the help we are giving it.
It is like calculus. When you mess up on one of the steps you can't just work around it. You have to start from the beginning and work your way up to your final solution. Only then will you get the best results and learn not to skip the fundamental steps.
