I am in a season of life where I am, by both desire and demand, doing a lot of rethinking. I have written about simplification and minimalism a bit before, but from the stance of wanting not needing to really do that much about it.

The reality is that rethinking things right now is right on target. Within a month we will be truly empty nesters. Our kids and their spouses spread to the four winds and without a lot of regular chance to do much more than message or FaceTime them.

This is hard. Harder than I would have expected. Much harder on my wife that either of us would have imagined due to the distance that will lie between us.

Luckily, we never succumbed to buying the bigger house. We are still in a relatively small house that is near to being paid off and the rest of our debt (outside of student loans) is pretty low. We have the opportunity to really do something different.

But will we?

The thought of doing life differently always seems really attractive, but it is in the doing where we tend to get tripped up. Sometimes it takes stepping out of the boat to determine just how deep or shallow the waters truly are – or does God have a plan to allow us to walk on them….

This can be really stressful. Our little family has been going through all of the symptoms; worry, fear, anxiety. They are all there just waiting to jump you from around a corner when we least expect it. The middle of the night is the worst, always has been for me. When I am awake I can face fears head on, but when I sleep my subconscious does a number on me.

The reality is there are a LOT of options and as such a tendency to mentally ramble along thinking about everything but doing very little. Especially for someone who tends to spend a lot of time in his head already. This too becomes a comfort as well. It is easy to think about change but much harder to actually enact change. The possibilities are, at times, more attractive than the realities.

The other reality is that there is much about the old man in me that needs to change. My life, I think any life, ends up being a pattern we tend to follow without fully realizing that we are doing so. It is habits, some good some bad, that we tend to follow without any thought to things turning out differently. We just continue to blithely spin through life doing the same things over and over again with just different background settings. Nothing truly changes. We are comfortable in the rut of our lives and just continue to walk the path until we see that the walls to either side of our path are far above our heads.

Sounds desperate doesn’t it!

But it isn’t, we are so comfortable in our rut that we have begun to adorn the sides of it with pictures and cubby holes to hold all of our rut trinkets.

The curios of rut life. We have even put them all on little doilies to display the habitual parts of our lives like trophies.

Ruts, rather than ditches, have a unique quality. Then tend to taper at the ends. They are shallow where they begin and end. Ditches can go on forever, ruts tend to have a more finite length. Thus it is important that we realize this and begin to climb out before our rut becomes a ditch. Once life becomes a ditch we tend to just follow the path it takes us rather than stepping out to forge a new path.

So, from a value standpoint where does this leave me? Well for one, I am recognizing the rut my life has been in and starting to put a name to the habits that helped me dig this well worn path. I think this is step one.

Put down the shovel you have been digging your rut with (to mix my metaphors a bit).

Not all habits are bad. However, we must name the habit, put a value to it and determine how we use the habit to our betterment rather than just allowing it to run as a program in the background of our lives. Even good habits allowed to run on their own tend to take over parts of our lives that we want to have some control over. It is the unthinking, daily driven habits that tend to shape the outcomes of our lives. Left to their own devices they will simply run our lives.

And we are none the better, necessarily, for it.

It is easy to let life run on autopilot until we realize that the altimeter is broken and we are facing a looming mountain directly ahead. At that point we have two choices; Accept what seems to be the inevitable or grab the stick and pull up, or at the very least bank away from the mountain.

The mountains in our lives are not always bad. The view as we pass the peak can be breathtaking and can lead to verdant valleys beyond.

This is where getting out of the rut tends to be most difficult. When we realize that as the rut tapers a mountain awaits us that is most often of our own making. We have just been too deep in our rut to realize that there is a mountain we need to get over.

So, as I climb out of my rut, set down the shovels of my habits and assess the mountain I might need to get over I do so with a glad heart. One that accepts where I am and looks forward to where I am headed!