New year, new you. In week one, you went hard: Add exercise, subtract boyfriend, multiply therapy. By week two, your skin feels amazing and you go to sleep sobbing every night. You feel alive; you feel like you’re going to die. It’s not the best. You've been rocked by an intervention binge. Don't change everything at once.
Your life is an experiment, if you didn't already know. And in every experiment, you are on a quest for a mythical city called causation. This is the procedure: change a variable, observe what happens, write it down, and repeat until you believe.
Wiring "what happened" to "what caused it" is the principle challenge of science because of confounding variables. Confounding variables are the untold stories that have something to say. The literature tells you that ice cream sales correlate with incidents of children drowning. The confounding variable is sunshine; it increases the likelihood of both, and "causes" neither.
When fixing a recipe for stew that ain't quite right, you can't change every ingredient at once. You tweak a thing, observe the taste, repeat. You cannot expedite this process.
Walk slowly to reveal the secrets of a city. Exercise slowly to bring every muscle into your command. Eat slowly to taste in high fidelity and relish the bitter notes. Think slow and you are meditating; gain access to the wordless wisdom of the universe. - Move as slow as possible
You are a conduit, a function of your inputs, even more susceptible than a stew. So Sip before you swig from tankard of progress. Turn off the firehose because you cannot integrate an infinite of stories. And Forget the thud factor. Change happens imperceptibly. Gradually and then suddenly, you are gone forever.