Old Habits Die Hard

The priest at mass today told an interesting story as part of his homily.

Essentially, he relayed the story of an old priest who walked through the forest with some young seminarians.

The old priest asked one of them to pull out a young oak sapling. Easily the seminarian was able to pull the sapling with one hand. Then the old priest pointed to another oak sapling and asked him to pull that one out. The second one was a little bigger than the first. The seminarian was able to extract the tree but he needed two hands to do so. The old priest then asked the seminarian to pull out a third tree, one which was much bigger than the first two. The seminarian could not pull it out on his own however with the help of some of his fellow seminarians, he was able to extract the oak. Finally, the old priest pointed to a huge oak tree. He asked the seminarian to extract the tree. This time, even with the help of his fellow seminarians, he was unable to make the tree budge.

The old priest then said that it was the same with bad habits. It is easier to get rid of bad habits if we nip them in the bud. Once bad habits have been with us for a long time and have taken root, it is harder to change.