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Oct 5

Words to Live By: It’s all about changing behavior – Ashland Daily Press

How to lose weight quickly Comments Off on Words to Live By: It’s all about changing behavior – Ashland Daily Press

I reconnected with a friend who became a civil engineer and his area of expertise is traffic flow. He says that people get in trouble at work for going onto a game website and solving logic problems and stuff when in reality he is paid to solve puzzles.

When he started to wax poetic about roundabouts I tried to change the subject by complaining about the timing of traffic lights, a complaint he must hear often because he had a well-prepared and thought out answer.

He said, Traffic lights are designed to carry you along arterial roads, main thoroughfares, with only having to stop once, at the beginning of your journey. If you go the prescribed speed limit then you can by design follow the arterial without stopping until you want to exit. The traffic control lights are where veins, secondary streets, want to join the arterial. Once you are allowed on an arterial from a vein you will have to stop once more, but that is it. The problem arises when people drive too fast. When people drive too fast they clog up sections of the arterial and then there is too much traffic in a section to move efficiently and then they get caught in the timing of the light. Speeders race to the next light and have to stop because they arrive before it has had a chance to turn green.

I asked what constitutes speeding. Anything more than two miles an hour over the prescribed speed limit.

His answer was well thought out and reasoned perfectly, but I didnt exactly like it. I wanted to blame a bureaucracy for random pettiness interfering with my freedom of mobility. He blamed me and my behavior.

He went on, Think about it. Why would we want to create a system that made things worse and made people mad at us? Why would we want to make it more difficult for you to get to work or your favorite restaurant or for an emergency vehicle to get to a scene? We design these things for the most efficient flow of traffic, but that only works if everyone goes along with the plan. People take the lights personally. People hurry to slowness. What can you do?

People hurry to slowness. Huh? It is funny how someone will pass you in a city and you will catch up with them at a light. They will charge ahead when it turns green and you will catch up with them at the next light. You will follow them into the parking lot and they will search for the closest space while you simply grab the first available spot, park, and walk into the store ahead of them.

By the way, I think people trying to park closest in the fitness center parking lot is one of the most hilarious things. I am here to exercise. The last thing in the world I want to do is take 20 extra steps!

But my friends answer made me realize something about me. I didnt like his answer because it meant I would have to change my behavior. I am that way about a lot of things and it probably makes me normal.

If I want to drive more quickly through traffic I need to drive the speed limit. Ughhh! If I want to lose weight and get in shape I need to change my eating and activity habits. What, no pill? If I want to score better in bowling I need to practice and do my muscle drills and keep proper form. A new bowling ball wont fix it? If I am at odds with an important person in my life I need to become sensitive to what they are thinking and feeling. You mean they arent going to change? If I want to sleep at night I need to not have any blue light two hours before I go to bed. So I cannot take my smartphone to bed with me?

I wonder how many problems go unsolved because the answer is simply to change behavior. It costs nothing, it often saves money, we become a better and healthier person by doing it, but it gets back to Adams sin. The first thing Adam did when confronted by God was to say, The woman you gave me . . . Adam is saying that it was not his behavior but Eves and Gods that caused the problem.

The problem with sin is that I want everything wrong in my life to be the rest of the worlds fault. And I want the whole world to change and then I want to take a pill to make it right. God forbid I would have to change my behavior.

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Words to Live By: It's all about changing behavior - Ashland Daily Press

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