Radical change

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How can radical change work for us? The thought of making big changes in our life, especially when they may not be understood by others, frightens us. Ethics frighten us. Our habits and addictions frighten us.
I grew up taking no notice of the animal body parts I was eating, yet I knew the sausages and ham and chops were once part of a living, breathing animal. Even as a child I knew they’d been killed for food for me ... but I decided to ignore it. Everyone knew it and everyone ignored it. We all ignored it together.
Ethical principles, when they become important, make short work of our old behaviours that we grew up with. Over the years I, like everyone else, acquired habits that made life easier and more pleasurable. The shops sold meat, cheese, chocolate, socks, shoes, jerseys, ice cream, hamburgers ... the list goes on and on. As far as I was concerned the ‘cost-to-me’ was all that mattered - was it too expensive, was it unhealthy? It never occurred to me that there was any other expense - that it all came at huge expense to the animals who were losing their lives, so that their bodies could be made available to humans, by way of humans persecuting them and executing them.
Even as a child I knew that it was all unethical but I did it, I ate them. I hid behind the fact that I didn’t know much detail. But when I did know the detail I still did it. I valued lifestyle above everything. I knew the theory - that there were no human-survival reasons why everything on that long list could not be dropped. But I wanted more than survival, I wanted a varied lifestyle. And that, by definition (I knew) was unethical. Giving up all of that would not be easy. I could either live unethically or with difficulty.
Now that difficulty was specifically a radical alteration of a daily habit, especially a habit concerning three-times-a-day food plus the doing-without very many items of daily use. That would need determination because there are just so many useful and wonderful things I’d be avoiding. Projecting how it might be - it’s almost as if my whole idea of pleasure must be sacrificed, as if only a dull life could be ethical. And yet these animals (I would say to myself) - can I let the atrocity continue?
But I still wobbled. “By going vegan I will probably fail, and can I afford to take that risk? For a start, I don’t think I’ve got the self-discipline to voluntarily kick a favourite habit. Truth to tell, I probably don’t want to kick it, I prefer to continue being as I am, especially since no one is pushing me on the matter”.
The human will project, hedge bets, try to play it safe. One day when things start to go wrong with the body we think about change. We remember way back, when we said to our self, “When the time comes I’ll change. I will change … but in my time”.

As our body fails and we see, for instance, that our eating habits are making us ill, even then we’re still reluctant to change. It’s the pleasure-association we can’t let go of. The body fails nonetheless and we wonder what we’re facing for the rest of our life? Not only can we not ignore symptoms (of the ageing body) but we can’t face the upheaval of ‘change’ and we have a nagging toothache-of-a-conscience which keeps telling us that we should have changed long before things got so out of hand.