It is said that choice is destiny’s soulmate.
You have a choice to accept or refuse, to take one turning down the crossroads to the future or another.
By not choosing, we allow others to decide for us. If you didn’t make the choice, you cannot blame someone else for your unhappiness.
As you retrace your journey…were you deliberate, impulsive? Was the choice made with your heart, mind or gut? Were you comfortable with your style of decision-making or did you cringe?
Did you weigh the options? Ponder the possibilities? Brood? Prayed for guidance or asked your heart?
Every choice I make is a leap in the dark, with the hope that I’ll land on my feet, believing that you only regret things that you have done and never things you did not do but could have done.
I believe in Hemingway’s “right decisions are the wrong decisions rightly made. (Think of Bergman’s choice of Rosselini.)
I always lived my choice and never looked back (think of Lot’s wife) for a long time, though eventually, with hindsight, I glanced back and saw which it was — wise or wrong, a calculated risk.
I did the best that one could and the spirit asked for nothing more.
I’ve never confused bad choices with wrong choices. We have all made them happen when we embark on sinuous stretches of self-destruction, usually with a smile.
You didn’t ask your heart or best friend for advice. You didn’t ponder and certainly didn’t pray. Why?
Because in the deepest intuitive level, you knew you shouldn’t have entertained the thought of this choice. But you wanted to do it so badly, that even its badness didn’t daunt you. In fact, it egged you on.
Even with closed eyes, you knew and saw disaster coming.
Bad choices, it is said, are made while we’re sleepwalking. Then, you wake up asking: “How could I have been so stupid?” Are these what psychiatrists call “coma choices?”
In a lifetime, I’ve made wise choices, good choices, strong choices, courageous choices and happy choices.
There were brilliant decisions but we just don’t remember many of them.
That’s because we shrug off any good thing that arrives in our lives as if it were a fluke — a lucky break, a misdelivery.
Certainly, I’ve never given myself credit. Only when things don’t work out, only when I make mistakes and stumble on missteps do I feel responsible. And then I claim all the blame.
Many of us think of choice as a spiritual gift, a choice burdened to be endured, not embraced.
Is there a more precious gift than free will?
The life at this exact moment, it doesn’t matter who you are, where you are or who you’re with.
It is a direct result of choices you made once upon a time, forty minutes or forty years ago.
From the time you decided to get out of bed, make breakfast, get the children to school, get to work on time, you’ve already made more than three choices.
Think of having to make 365 choices in order to spend the distance between your dreams and their coming true.
A wrong choice is not necessarily a bad choice. We don’t know if it is wise or wrong, until we lived it.
We’re torn between the agonizing “should and should not,” in an inner debate that begins to rage into melancholic remorse.
What we will be searching for are choices which gave the moment that made a difference in the trajectory of one’s life –through the successes and failures that define us.
Through the loves and hates, gains and losses, promises and pain, we bore one through the risks and ruins, tumults and triumphs that set one free.
We reflect on all the perfectly reasonable choices that derailed one’s dreams, as we try to brush off clinging and hiding half-truths which have haunted us all these years.
Pay dirt.
***
E-mail Mylah at [email protected]
