[Advice] How to apply once-in-a-lifetime experiences to everyday life

The great frustration of the most impactful experiences like vacations, concerts, weddings, retreats, or even reading a powerful book is the impact quickly fades away.
When these paradigm-shifting moments occur it feels like our world is shifting onto a new axis and the insight or realizations we have are profound. It’s hard to believe we’ll ever be the same again.
But a few days later we’ve almost entirely forgotten the experience. We slowly slipped back into our old routines before we even noticed what happened.
We all have busy lives and without taking the time to intentionally reflect on the experiences, the positive effects don’t stand a chance of sticking around.
Pouring a bunch of salt into cold water will create a solution, but not all of the salt will dissolve. If we take the time to heat the water and stir it carefully as it’s heating up, all of the salt will be absorbed into the water.
The experiences we have in our own lives are no different. Significant events dump new insights, philosophies, and beliefs into our heads. Unless we take the time to carefully reflect and examine these new ideas as soon as we get back to our normal day-to-day, we’ll never be able to absorb them.
If these new beliefs or priorities are as profound as they seem, we need to take the time necessary to integrate them into our lives so they’re not filtered out when our real life resumes again.
To do this, we need to understand the insights and change our behavior.
If we go on vacation and come back with a profound sense of peace and calm that we’ve never felt before, we need to figure out why we felt that way before changing our behavior to integrate that feeling into our day-to-day lives.
Figuring out what makes us feel a certain way and why requires a significant investment in reflecting on the experience and ourselves. The best way to understand everything going on beneath the surface is cracking open a new journal and putting pen to paper.
Only after we understand the experience and why it had a profound impact can we begin the process of applying the learnings to our everyday lives.
Understanding these experiences and distilling the learnings are incredibly difficult, but the hardest part of this process is changing our existing routine.
Our lives are a fully saturated solution. If we try to add something new it will settle at the bottom of the container instead of dissolving. Successfully adding something new to the mixture requires removing something else.
It seems like improvement and success comes from expanding our capacity to do more. While we can increase our capacity, we can’t expand it far enough to achieve the lifestyle we want.
The sustainable and effective path to growth is living a life filled with worthwhile experiences, processing the learnings, removing the things that no longer serve us, and replacing them with something better.
We don’t need to do more to be better, we need to evolve our routines.

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Adapted from Prompted, a newsletter delivering insights and prompts designed to help readers become a bit better each day.