Habit

 The end of line 18 really seems to sum up the __Poem in Five Chapters__ by Portia Nelson nicely, "It's a habit". The speaker tells of how while walking through their life, they unknowingly falls into a "hole", one of the many challenges that life throws at you, a difficulty that takes the speaker a long time to recover from and get their life back on track. Yet when confronted with the same difficulty again, despite the struggle they had from their last stumble, the speaker still chooses to repeat the same mistake again because it was something they know, something dependable that they can rely on, where as to "walk around the hole" is to do the unknown. This poem is about how people are always repeating their own mistakes simply because doing something different can sometimes be a scary thought. By the last chapter of the poem, the speaker makes a life choice to do the unknown and "walk down another street" of their life, an act of courage.