Human Fallacy

     To say that we as humans act in a logical manner is, more often than not, totally untrue. It's amazing how many times I see, in other's lives as well as my own, instances where the right thing to do or the correct action is not the one we take. Over and over in my own life, I have times where I can see what I need to do, understand why I need to do it, see what the outcome will be if I don't do it, and yet I don't actually do that thing that I need to do. I've come to the conclusion that our actions are ones that we perform with the influence of a mix of factors. Doing something beneficial may look good on paper and may make sense, but in reality we need that reason along with a will, the right setting and a sense of motivation to follow through. The most ironic part of all this that I find is that we all realize this oddity in our human nature yet we're powerless to change it.

     There are many ways in which we may try to change the way we do something or change how we go about getting things done, such as creating to do lists or gaining advice on how to do something better. In the end though, all of human history shows the limits of our efforts. The other strange thing is that something that may make sense and seem like the right thing to do to us may not seem like that to someone else. Try as we may, we can never fully understand what someone else is thinking, regardless of how well we think we know them. I know for me personally as an introvert, I spend a lot of time observing, analyzing, and playing through scenarios in my head about how an action will play out or how a conversation with someone may go.  There are times I feel like I'm Sherlock Holmes in Game of Shadows. It never ceases to amaze me though how often these scenarios don't happen as I expected. On the other side of this, it seems as though we can never quite fully make someone else see just how it is we feel or what it is we're thinking. I keep wanting to somehow convey my thoughts and feelings into someone else's head like it's something I could load on a flash drive and transfer to them, but I keep hitting the wall of reality.

     This whole topic of actions not always following logic is something that has come up a lot for me in recent months, and I guess its always been there, just not as prominent in my thoughts. Oddly enough, the church service I went to this past Sunday was on this topic, talking about Romans 7:14-25 and how we do the things we know we don't want to do. This worked out well because I was thinking of this passage just the night before. On a quick side note and as a preview, that phenomena of me seeing things coming before they happen will be discussed in my next post. Anyway, the man giving the message that morning talked about how there are a lot of things in our lives where we just keep trying to do what we know we need to, but we fail repeatedly. This was strange for me sitting there in a room full of people mostly older than me all seeming to agree with him because I realized that this is a natural occurrence that's not likely to end anytime soon in my life. The main point of his message was that we are so lucky to be covered by God's grace, because it just keeps going regardless of how many times we act as Paul describes in the passage. Paul's writing about this clearly shows that this is nothing new but it's something that we must live with and in a sense can rest easy with because we know we're not alone. For me, I'm having to learn more and more that change, along with a lot of other things, can be a slow process. Changing habits, finding motivation, and shifting the way we live doesn't always happen quite as quickly as our fast paced society would like it to. Often we can see the results we want but when they don't happen instantly or sometimes even at all, we're left wondering what happened. This can easily be related to the concept of New Year's resolutions and how it seems like every year people make them and yet every year people joke about how they've failed to fully realize them.

     Overall, I guess it's like Paul says in Romans 7:23, "there is another power within me that is at war with my mind." We keep at it, whatever it may be, because we have a drive to succeed and a guilt if we do nothing. The brokenness of humanity, including my own, will continue to baffle me as long as I live, in all of the forms it comes in. For me, I've discovered that writing things down and checking things off makes me feel accomplished and makes me more successful, although again this is something that I fail to always do even though I know the benefits that will come from it. Really though, it seems as though more often than not we set up the logical course of action, just to watch it fall apart due to our human fallacy and this crazy thing called life.