Zig Ziglar used to say, “Your spouse didn’t leave you because you didn’t make the bed that day.” Poor results, bad outcomes, and failures seldom occur because of a single thing. One bad decision, one incident, or one mistake can shift our trajectory toward catastrophe, but usually isn’t the sole cause of that catastrophe.
I have sat with new patients in severe pain thousands of times. They often sit in bewilderment, wondering how they could be suffering so badly without having had a severe accident, trauma, or reason for being in such pain. “All I did was sneeze”… “All I did was bend down to tie my shoe”… “All I did was pick up my baby”…
While the illusion is that their massive pain came suddenly and out of the blue, the truth is that it had been building for days, weeks, and often years. Symptoms are the last thing that come in most disease processes. Think of heart disease and cancer. These are two conditions that often go undetected and unnoticed until they reach late stages. By the time you even know you have them, it’s frequently too late.
Cavities and tooth decay are great examples. By the time you have tooth pain, the degeneration in the tooth has likely been brewing for some time. Dentists have done a phenomenal job of educating the public about preventative dentistry, getting people to come in for regular check-ups, even if they have no pain. Why? Because we know now that you can have a cavity without having any pain. And if you catch the cavity early, you can prevent tooth erosion, decay, and bigger problems down the road.
In most areas of life, we can get away with a lot without experiencing trouble. Things usually don’t go from very good to massively bad. There’s a big gap that allows us to slack off, make mistakes, and disregard without feeling the ill effects of these shortcomings. It happens in our health, our relationships, our finances, and our work. Neglect or abuse can go on for a period of time without us ever noticing, but eventually it snaps. And we mistakenly think that the straw that “broke the camel’s back” was the cause of the entire issue, not realizing that every straw before that last one contributed to the broken back.
A major accident can take a person from being perfectly healthy to completely incapacitated. The stock market crashing can take a millionaire to bankruptcy. An affair can take a solid marriage to divorce. And screwing up a high-priority project at work can take a person from being gainfully employed to jobless. Instantaneous failures do happen. Big events can, and will, crush a person in any area of life. But it isn’t the catastrophic events that wreak havoc on people’s lives, it is the day-in and day-out neglect that slowly erodes things, eventually leading to the collapse.
It’s not the major accident that ruins health, but the years of terrible eating, lack of exercise, poor sleep, and other bad lifestyle choices. It’s not the market crashing that leads to financial duress, but the continued spending more than you make over years. It’s not a full-blown affair that brings down marriages, but the lack of communication, lack of attention, and ignoring the little things that were done early in the relationship. And it isn’t one big event that ruins careers, but the months of cutting corners, showing up late, leaving early, or poor performance that leads to the company not needing you any longer.
We love to blame our failures on one big thing. We have a strong tendency to think that whatever it is that we just did was the cause of our bigger fallouts. It’s a reasonable and logical thing to do, but the truth is, our biggest problems have been brewing for some time. Like a dam that is under too much pressure, it eventually has to give way.
In the song, Just Give Me a Reason, by Pink, there is a line that I love… “Just give me a reason, just a little bit’s enough, just a second, we’re not broken, just bent, and we can learn to love again.” Think about what areas of your life are bent, but not broken yet. You won’t see the bend unless you look. And if you don’t look, eventually it will break. And you’ll be just like everyone else, sitting there in despair, shaking your head in disbelief, mistakenly saying… “All I did was…”
