Sometimes, you just have to burn bridges in life, and build new habits and ideas out of old ones. Here is the catch though: New things done in a better way than the old successfully are best. But when you try to duplicate the old, what happens? Nothing usually happens except that those who relive their past mistakes are doomed to repeat them.
I once saw this Mickey Rourke movie called “Johnny Handsome” in which the main character was a physically ugly man who got plastic surgery to be physically good looking or handsome, but he was not changed inside. That brings me to a point: Spiritual renewal is always more potent and lasting than physical renewal because the nature of spiritual renewal is deep, and physical renewal even if the spirit does change, is always shallow. Either way, spiritual renewal is always more potent then, is it not?
The ultimate intelligent move is to renew the spirit before anything else, then. Sure, I can write “as within, so without”, but what comes first in that quote? “As within”, right? Yes, most definitely. We must work with causes, working with effects only changes surface things anyway. Change the cause genuinely and you have changed everything.
Change the surface and you have only changed the effects. Deep change is always necessary and beautiful. It is like car body work versus getting a new engine to run the car. The engine will run better every time you genuinely fix it, while if you just fix the body, it will look good, but it may not run any better.
Replacing or fixing the total thing will burn the bridges and start anew, I admit. But, sometimes, reality calls for an extreme overhaul of everything. I can and do admit that too. Some of the best lives have failed in this way, and then succeeded in another way totally different, yet better. Overhaul within, and without will be better genuinely. After all the philosophy is “cause and effect”, not “effect and cause”. Like I said, fixing the outer car shell to look great will not make it run better.
So, when getting real, get deeply real. Do not play shallow games with getting real. Get down to the grits and sweat of change. That really is the only way to change.
When change comes, we may not always like it, but it is necessary, realistically necessary. The word in italic print is the key, “necessary” if improperly interpreted is just surface acknowledgment. Take it how you may, but that is reality to the highest degree. Unless you are totally realistic, productive change cannot happen. That is the burning sensation of our lives that does count, all else is just the window dressing of “how it looks”.