My husband and I love to go fourwheeler riding. Anyone who does any kind of off-road riding knows that trails develop because they have been driven over. Someone found a way through the woods or whatever terrain and others followed the tracks because the first person proved that path was passable. Enough vehicles pass that way and the dirt packs too hard for plants to grow, leaving an obvious dirt road. Dirt turns into mud, tires plow through it and dig channels, more tires follow the same channels because obviously the first guy didn’t sink there, and the ruts get deeper and deeper.
At first it seems so much safer and easier to follow the same path that everyone did before you, but eventually something else happens. The ruts get deeper while the ground between them stays the original height. The tires going through the ruts carry vehicles, and eventually while the tires could go through the ruts the vehicle frame can’t make it over that middle hump. It’s stuck. The tires keep spinning but the vehicle doesn’t move.
The only way a stuck vehicle is going anywhere is being pulled out by another vehicle. Sometimes the process of being pulled out breaks important parts on the bottom so the vehicle doesn’t run anymore. Suddenly using those established ruts became very expensive and caused a whole lot of trouble for more than one person. The problem is usually fixable, but going the easy established way isn’t easy anymore.
Sometimes life can be like that. It’s so much easier to just follow established paths without really paying attention. It’s what everyone else is doing, so why change anything? We don’t even notice we’re in the ruts until we’ve sunk ourselves so deep we can’t go forward or backward. When we finally manage to get out of the roubles we caused, often we are so broken we still can’t go anywhere and the need to heal consumes the time we could have used to reach our goals.
Don’t follow the ruts.
The Word Worker 