It is a scientific truth that water becomes steam when it is heated to 100 degrees centigrade.
Now imagine we put some water in a container and put it on a stove, and just as the water is heating up, we move the container from the stove. What will happen? The water will cool down naturally. However, if we continue heating the water long enough, the water transforms from a liquid state into steam as soon as the temperature hits the hundred-degree mark.
For water to transform into steam, we need to heat the water long enough to hit the boiling temperature. If we take the heat source away, the transformation will not happen.
Many of us suffer this bad habit or weakness. We start something something new, progressive, keeping up to a strict regimen for some time. And then, just when we are on the threshold of some transformation, we give up and slide back to the normal state.
What’s Your Boiling Point?
Be it practicing Yoga, running, or working out daily to be fit, reading daily, controlling anger, or waking up by 5 am- all of us are constantly looking to make changes in our lifestyle, hoping for personal transformation. We keep at it for a month, two months, but at some point, something happens, and that chain of continuity breaks. Exams, Marriage in the family, Festivals, Sickness- Many insidious reasons pull us back. All the hard work put in till that point goes to waste, and we regress to the default state.
It is like the water container being taken away from the heat source.
Whatever skill or habit you are looking to develop, this holds true. E.g., you train for public speaking, but you don’t practice the craft for two months; whatever you have learned and practiced is lost. To get back into the groove, it will take the same amount of time and effort you had put in up to that point.
With water, we know that the boiling temperature is 100 degrees.
What is the equivalent of the hundred degrees for us? Alas, there is no science to establish the equivalent of boiling temperature for any personal transformation. Every person is unique, and there is no single magic format that will work. For some, the transformation can happen overnight; it can take months or years for someone else.
For a transformation to occur, we have to keep the heat source for as long as it takes. Change held long enough becomes transformation.
If you are looking for a transformation in your life, and you are on some good path already, then come what may- Don’t break the chain.
