Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas
May your choices reflect your hopes, and not your fears? Unknown
If we have a choice, we should make what we think is the best choice. If we don’t choose, we’ll have to live with everyone else’s choice.
If we think our choices don’t matter, is that why we don’t make better choices or make any choice? If every choice we make in life builds our life, and it makes sense that it does, do we eliminate the worst choices and think of the long-term consequences before we make a choice?
As I sit writing this, my husband is listening to people complaining about the price of food, gas, eggs, and deodorant. What are we to make of the cost of food these days? We should realize how lucky we’ve been, and we might want to go back to the days of cheap food, and maybe we can, or maybe we can’t. I remember asking Mom about the price of food when she first got married in 1941, and she said they spent every penny they could on food. She told me they budgeted to the penny, and to buy her a Christmas present, her husband quit smoking to save up the money for her gift.
I’ve never budgeted to the penny, but I did take a calculator to the grocery store to keep our food bill in check, and maybe this practice should be brought back. We live in peace and plenty, and today we have choices to make, and in the end, those choices will add up to our lives. Will we look back and think we made the best choices, or will we think, if we could do it again, we’d make a different choice?
In the end that was the choice you made, and it doesn’t matter how hard it was to make it. It matters that you did. Cassandra Clare
Is it possible to make the best choice every time? Probably not, because we don’t know what the future holds, and if things go one way, choice A might be best, and if things go a different way, choice B might be best. In the middle of things, we might always question our choices, perhaps this is one of the laws of life. If this isn’t how life works, how could the Israelites who were freed from bondage in Egypt have longed to go back to what they left when they hit the hardships that freedom brought?
We want to keep the good we have, and the good that might come from a choice, and this can fill us with doubt. What if we stay where we are with what we know, instead of forging on to the Promised Land? That Promised Land might be a new job, getting married, starting a family, starting a business, moving to a new country, or even retiring and enjoying the golden years we’ve worked so hard for. No matter the choice we make, we will likely at some point look longingly back at where we were and the choices we didn’t make.
The more choices we have, the more dissatisfied we might be with the ones we made, or worse yet might not be able to bring ourselves to make a choice, and we sit on the fence of life waiting, hoping, and praying for the courage to make a decision that will propel us forward, but life is still moving forward even if we aren’t.
Not making a choice is a choice; we live with the consequences when we don’t choose. Making the best choice is probably better than living with the direction our life will take when we have to live with everyone else’s choices.
If we have a choice to make today, we should make it and get on with living our best life. The sum of daily choices adds up, and so does the sum of not making choices.
Who does more complaining after an election, those who voted or those who didn’t vote? In America, 90 million Americans didn’t vote in the last election, and that’s a bigger number than those who voted. Do you think those who didn’t vote are happier with everyone else’s choice than if they’d made a choice themselves?
There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist or accept the responsibility for changing them. Denis Waitley
It doesn’t matter which side of the fence you get off on sometimes. What matters most is getting off. You cannot make progress without making decisions. Jim Rohn
Our lives are fashioned by our choices. First we make our choices. Then our choices make us. Anne Frank
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