Inquiry · “You Are Not Your Thoughts”
Resist Beginnings
To catch a temptation or bad habit at its first small stirring and refuse it then — and to work patiently at uprooting one besetting fault at a time rather than attempting wholesale reform.
Resist beginnings: Catch the temptation or bad habit at its first small stirring and refuse it then, while resistance is cheap (“check the beginnings”). Work on one besetting fault at a time, patiently (“one fault rooted out” a year). Resolve against it each morning; examine your day each evening. Patience and humility, not force.
What it is
This is à Kempis’s discipline of small, early self-conquest. Two linked counsels: first, intercept a temptation or bad habit while it is still a faint first movement, because once indulged it grows past control — “Check the beginnings; once thou might’st have cured, / But now ’tis past thy skill, too long hath it endured” (Bk 1, Ch 13).
Second, do not attempt to fix everything at once; uproot one besetting fault at a time: “If each year should see one fault rooted out from us, we should go quickly on to perfection” (Bk 1, Ch 25). The practice is honest self-observation in the service of restraint — noticing the inward stirring, naming the fault, and refusing it at the threshold.
It trains the discipline of self-mastery (The Inner Creates the Outer), the laying-down (and un-laying) of habit (The Inner Creates the Outer), and the watching faculty (Life Is a Dream).
(Distinct file note: this differs from the Fourth-Way self-observation files —, — which observe non-judgmentally to wake up and see mechanicalness. à Kempis’s medieval version observes in order to restrain and amend: catch the fault early, refuse it, and uproot one at a time. It is moral self-conquest, not neutral witnessing.)
The Method
As à Kempis counsels it:
- Watch for the first stirring. Notice temptation or a bad habit while it is still small — a thought, an impulse, the opening move. He warns that temptations are overcome “little by little, through patience and long-suffering,” and that the principle is to “withstand the beginning” (Bk 1, Ch 13).
- Refuse it at the threshold. Act against it while resistance is still cheap: “Check the beginnings. now ’tis past thy skill, too long hath it endured” (Bk 1, Ch 13). The early “no” is far easier than a late one.
- Target one fault. Don’t attempt total reform. Choose your single most besetting fault and work patiently at uprooting it: “If each year should see one fault rooted out from us, we should go quickly on to perfection” (Bk 1, Ch 25).
- Persist with patience, not violence. à Kempis frames conquest as gradual and humble, expecting setbacks; the aim is steady amendment, not a heroic single effort.
- Anchor it with a daily review. Pair the watching with à Kempis’s rhythm: “In the morning make thy resolves, and in the evening inquire into thy life” (Bk 1, Ch 19) — resolve against the fault by day, examine how you fared by night. (Sourcing note: quotations from Book 1, Chapters 13, 19, and 25 of standard public-domain English translations.)
Source & Lineage
The maxim principiis obsta (“resist beginnings,” from Ovid) was a commonplace of moral and monastic counsel; à Kempis sets it inside the Devotio Moderna’s intensely practical asceticism, which prized small daily self-examination and incremental amendment over dramatic feats.
The “one fault a year” counsel is one of his most quoted lines on patient self-reform. → author id thomas a kempis.
Common refinements
Waiting too long. The whole point is early — once a habit is “long endured” it is far harder; intervene at the first stirring.
- Trying to fix everything at once. à Kempis’s correction: one fault at a time.
- Self-conquest by force/shame. He counsels patience and humility; harsh self-attack backfires and can curdle into scrupulosity.
- Watching without amending (or amending without watching). The two halves go together: see the stirring, then refuse it.