Spring cleaning for the soul

Have you noticed we all tend to accumulate bad habits? Good habits are hard to accumulate, but bad habits tend to pile up with no problem.

Let’s say you have a scoop of ice cream one night before you go to bed. You enjoy that ice cream and consider it a harmless indulgence. And since it was so nice, the next night, you do the same. Maybe you do it the next night and then again the next night.

Pretty soon, you have made a habit of ice cream before bed. Before long, you notice this habit accumulating on your hips and see the habit when you weigh yourself on the bathroom scale.

Bad habits sneak up on us and accumulate.

I have a suggestion for you and your bad habits: Spring cleaning for the soul. I suggest you set aside 40 days to work on eliminating a bad habit, or two.

You know what spring cleaning is, right? Spring cleaning is when we clean the closets, dust the shelves and give the house a thorough scrubbing. Your soul needs the same sort of cleaning.

Over the years, our souls get burdened with dirty, messy, dusty habits. We yell at the kids, say rude words to our spouse, insist on going first at the stop sign, treat the cashier at the grocery store unkindly, eat the wrong foods, smoke too much, drink too much, and the like.

All these bad habits damage our souls. Our souls are the interior, eternal part of who we are, and they can be damaged, just as our exterior, physical self gets damaged.

I suggest you set aside the month of March and first 10 days of April for spring soul-cleaning.