GOOD AND BAD HABITS

 

GOOD AND BAD HABITS 

A habit is defined as something one does often and almost without thinking.  Once formed a habit is hard to break.  

There are good and bad habits. Good habits keep you healthy and happy; safe and loveable; successful and comfortable; they maintain your good reputation and win you more and more friends and admirers.

Bathing daily, going for a walk, doing some exercise, eating nutritious food, reading books, offering prayers, appreciating  friends and relatives, saying please and thank you are some of the good habits.

Drinking, smoking, gambling, eating too much, oversleeping, criticizing others, losing temper and making excuses for not performing your duties and fulfilling your promises are a few bad habits.

Cursing is bad; blessing is good.

The best period for forming good habits and avoiding bad habits is childhood. Homes and educational institutions are the most important places for cultivating civilized behavior with good habits.

It is well said that habits are good servants but bad masters. Whereas they save your time, they snatch your liberty to change your life style.

The American clergy George B. Cheever (1807-90) said: Habit is the child of impulse. There is in human life the period of impulse, when habit is nothing; and there is the period of habit, when impulse is nothing. Young persons are creatures of impulse; old persons are creatures of habit. Almost everything is impulse with a little child, and nothing can be called habit; almost everything is habit in the second childhood of old age, and there is very little that can be called impulse. Impulse is habit in formation; habit is impulse fixed. When habit is once formed ,impulse is powerless against it. Indeed all impulse falls into it. It is like a deep and swift and resistless river, into which an opposing mountain current may pour with tremendous momentary shock and  agitation, but with no effect whatever, save to increase the volume, rapidity, and fury of the tide, which is turned downward to the sea.

To conclude, here is another significant quote: Sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny. ----American clergy George Dana Boardman (1828-1903).

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G.R.Kanwal

!3 February 2025