David McElroy

By the time I finished showing houses late Sunday afternoon, I was exhausted and starving. It had been a busy weekend and I suddenly realized I hadn’t eaten all day. But what did I want?

I felt a gnawing craving inside. It was a familiar craving, but what was it for? Was it for steak? Pizza? Chicken? I genuinely felt confused.

I’ve gone through this odd process a thousand times before. I’m hungry but everything I think of feels wrong. I stopped at a couple of restaurants, thinking they might be what I needed, but each time I stopped, I felt a cold emptiness — because I realized what I needed wasn’t inside.

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When’s the last time you changed your mind — and heart — about something really important?

Were you eager to tell your friends that you had been wrong before and you’d seen the light? Or were you hesitant to let people know? Were you sheepish about telling people that you had abandoned what you had believed was true? Did you struggle to explain how you could have believed one thing and then abandoned that faith or belief or person for something entirely different?

If you’re anything like me, you experience some internal discomfort — a sense of cognitive dissonance — about having to make major internal changes. There’s something in us that wants to be consistent with what we’ve said and done in the past.

And that ego-driven desire to be consistent with our past errors frequently keeps us stuck with our mistakes. It turns out that any serious positive growth in our lives is blocked until we can cast aside our old errors and admit our past choices were wrong. That is incredibly difficult for some people.

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The cats pretend they’re not excited, but I know better. They’re just as happy as I am that Lucy came to live with us, so they’re celebrating — in their own dignified feline ways — the second anniversary of Lucy joining us.

When she came to live with us, Lucy was terrified of the world. The people who had rescued her and worked with her before she came to us declared that she would always be a “special-needs doggie” who wouldn’t do very well and would probably never warm up to people.

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