Below is an excerpt from Anthony DeStefano’s new book 30 Days to Your New Life
Why So Many Things are Going Wrong in Your Life
When everything seems to be falling apart and you’re not happy and not at peace, you can’t just think that you’re going to change one thing and your whole life will be miraculously transformed. It won’t, because “what’s wrong” with your life is almost never just one thing. It’s everything. It’s the whole thing. It’s all connected.
When you try to separate the body, the mind, and the spirit and excel in one particular area, you might very well have some degree of success, but your life, as a whole, is not going to benefit — in fact, your life, as a whole, might even suffer.
Think of it this way: If you move your left leg in one direction, and your right leg in the other, you’re not going to go anywhere, are you? You’re going to be stuck in the same position. Or if you’re driving your car and you try to step on the gas with one foot and the brake with the other, you’re going to come to a screeching halt, right? And you’ll probably do some damage to your vehicle, too.
The same concept applies to your life.
You’re a human being. That means you’re a combination of body, mind, and spirit. You’re not just one entity. You’re not pure spirit, like the angels, and you’re not pure matter, like the computer screen or the smart phone in front of you. You’re all three, at the very same time. That’s what separates you from the rest of creation. And all three—body, mind, and spirit—are “wired” together, intricately and seamlessly.
What’s the practical result? It means that if you stuff yourself with food and continually overeat, you might not just gain weight — you might also start feeling lazy or spiritually dry or sexually tempted, or you might find that it’s easier for you to lie or cheat or lose your temper. The reason is that your body is wired to your spirit.
And if you read a thousand books in an effort to improve your mind but fail to exercise spiritual charity and humility, you may end up knowing a lot of useless facts and acquire the reputation of a scholar, but underneath you might still be a hypocrite who’s wrong on the most basic moral and ethical issues. Do you know any people like that? Any college professors, maybe? Any elected officials? I do! The reason is that the mind and the spirit are wired together and can’t be separated. If you do something bad to one, the other is going to be affected in some way.
Now, how everything is connected is a little difficult to understand — even for the greatest theologians — and could easily be the subject of a whole book. But the bottom line is that it has to do with your will. Remember, all the decisions you make in life are controlled by your God-given free will. Try to picture this diagram. On one side you have all your desires — the desires of your body, the desires of your mind, and the desires of your spirit. And on the other side you have your conscience—the knowledge of right and wrong, the knowledge of which desires you should say yes to and which you should say no to. Over and above both of these is your will, which acts as the arbiter and judge between the two.
Your will is constantly making decisions. Day in, day out, year in, year out, in thousands of different situations, your will is choosing. And the more you give in to desires that are not good for you — that is, the more you disobey your conscience — the more your will is weakened. The will is just like a muscle. It needs to be exercised in order to stay strong. When you don’t exercise it, it shrivels up and loses all its strength. Then, when it’s called upon to make tough decisions in other areas of your life, it’s not able to.
So many of your problems are really the result of your weakened will. And it’s not all your fault! The world and all its glittering attractions have been working hard to erode it since you were born. In fact, the world is always trying to brainwash you. It’s always trying to get you to eat certain foods, drink certain beverages, buy certain products, wear certain clothes, use certain perfumes, watch certain programs, read certain books, vote for certain candidates, believe certain principles, accept certain “facts,” become addicted to certain activities, and on and on, ad nauseam. In order to persuade you to do these things, the world has many effective tools at its disposal: advertisements via social media, television, and radio, propaganda via the entertainment industry, indoctrination via the education system, biased reporting via the mass media, ideologically driven laws and court decisions via the government. All of these methods are employed with the most sophisticated use of words, sounds, and images designed to tap into your deepest physiological and emotional desires.
That’s why people are always complaining that they have no willpower. They’ve lost it because they’ve made hundreds and hundreds of bad choices that have essentially caused their will to atrophy, thereby losing its ability to choose wisely or to stick to choices it knows are correct.
It’s so important for you to get what I’m saying here. Everything is intertwined! It’s all part of the same system. When you give in to one particular desire that’s wrong — be it physical, intellectual, or spiritual — you weaken the whole system and make it easier to succumb to other desires that aren’t good for you. And those other desires might be totally different from the ones you originally made bad choices about. When you weaken the will, you lose power everywhere in life. You darken your intellect so it can’t see what’s right. You disable your body so it can’t fight temptation. You deaden your spirit so it can’t resist sin. You de-energize everything.
You’re really a very incredible creation—a well-balanced, harmonious, integrated machine — and if you screw around with one part of it, you’re going to cause the whole thing to break down.
What this means, practically, is that you have no choice but to take a holistic, “total person” approach to life, especially when it comes to seeking happiness. You can’t simply lose weight and expect to be happy. You can’t simply make more money and expect to be happy. You can’t simply read a bunch of books—or write them, for that matter — and expect to be happy. You can’t even just pray and expect to be happy. Even the holiest hermits have to get out into the open air and exercise once in a while in order to clear their heads. Otherwise, their interior prayer life would eventually dry up. It has to — it’s a law of the universe, a law put there by God Himself when He created us.
Look, you know this is true — especially in the area of morality. You know that you can’t practice vice virtuously. Let me repeat that: You can’t practice vice virtuously.
A person who embezzles from his job is going to be the same kind of person who cheats on his taxes, the same kind of person who is dishonest about money in general. A person who is slovenly and sloppy and disorganized in his professional life is also going to be slovenly, sloppy, and disorganized in the way he thinks — and probably in his relationships as well. A person who is addicted to pornography is going to be the same kind of person who lies to his spouse and—given the right opportunity—has affairs with other people. He’s not going to be a loving, honest, adoring, faithful husband. And if you think otherwise, you’re living in a fantasy world.
Oh, sure, you may be able to get away with “compartmentalizing” your ethics for a while — cheating in one area and trying to be “pure” in another — but it won’t work for long, and certainly not forever. The same goes for the other parts of your life that aren’t directly connected to morality. Plenty of people have satisfactory work lives but miserable marriages. Or wonderfully fit bodies but emotional lives that are a wreck. Or stimulating intellectual lives but terribly unhealthy eating habits. People function all the time in this fractured, compartmentalized way. But it can’t work forever. Eventually your life is going to fall apart. It has to—because the foundation of the entire structure, your will, is the thing that has been eroded.
Listen, if you chop a worm into sections, the severed pieces can still live and move. But you’re not a worm! You’re a human being, made in the image and likeness of God. You have a certain physical, psychological, and spiritual unity. You can’t be sliced apart into separate living entities, like some grotesque slithering invertebrate.
And even if you could live that way, who would want to? The goal in life is not simply to “function” or “cope.” It’s to achieve happiness— not just in this world but in the next. And to be truly happy, truly fulfilled, and truly at peace, you must be improving in every area of your life at the same time. You must commit to working on the big picture —the whole enchilada!
Do that, and you’ll be a million miles ahead of most of the people around you.
Anthony DeStefano is the best-selling author of more than twenty-five Christian books for adults and children, including: “A Travel Guide to Heaven”, “Ten Prayers God Always Says Yes To”, “Little Star”, and “The Donkey No One Could Ride.” Anthony has been the host of two television series on the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), as well as several children’s programs. He has received many awards and honors from religious communities throughout the world. Anthony is a Knight of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, the oldest Order in the Catholic Church. He is an avid pilot, and lives with his wife, Jordan, in New Jersey.
