We all make them. Lots of them every day. However, I see that I avoid them a great deal, forcing others into a place where they do my dirty work for me. I can see that now. I don’t like it, but I see it.
Do you ever wake up in your life and feel like you have just been dropped back into your body after some movie like distance where you spend time floating above your body and watching from the outside. Then without warning or appropriate preparation, you are dropped back in. With a great whoosh, there you are back in ground level, no more 30,000 foot views. You are just there in your body, and the floating vantage point is no longer available to you? You are now ground level, footwork tasked and that is just the way it is. There is now work to be done and while you are not sure what it is, you know that forward progress is coming, and it cares little about whether you like it or not.
This is where I am. Plagued with choices and a seeming inability to deal with making one over another. What I see is that I do this a lot. Put myself smack dab in the middle of two choices where it seems like I must select one or the other, but in reality, there is always only one choice. Whether to have my own back, or throw myself under whatever convenient bus happens my way.
I usually pick the bus. The carnage is familiar. It is painful but it feels safer than the other choice. Just writing that made my stomach flip flop. Why, why is so hard to choose yourself?
In a lifetime of experiences where you give yourself away, why does that seem the better choice? How could it ever really be the better choice?
So on this New Year’s Eve, I sit with one choice. The one where I do what I always do, or the one where I don’t. Honestly, I really do not know what I will do. The compulsion to pick something else is pretty out there for me. I do not really like my reality when I pick the other but it is familiar in its pain and attendant aftermath, so while it isn’t good, it is feels safer even though it isn’t safe at all.
In a world where our choices are growing exponentially, I find myself longing for a simpler time where there were not so many choices. Or really, perhaps it isn’t about choices at all. Perhaps what I am really striving for is the ability to love me enough to pick myself over others. To really make choices that support me being cared for by me. To make choices that show me that I love me, that I care for me. That I am ok even if I make choices that put me out on my own, on a path that no one but me really sees as valid or understands.
I guess that is what I am most afraid of...there is really only one choice, ever. That is to be willing to grow in the direction of God’s will. Which sometimes feels so not good. But to move in that direction anyway, trusting when the path seems littered with debris. Trusting that life is not really about choices at all...it is always just one choice...being true to yourself and being honest about that, or lying, to cover who you really are. To thine own self be true...because that is the only way to lead a life with integrity, and without that, fear reigns supreme and allows for God’s will to be forever lost among the choices.
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