Choices.
We’re all faced with them.
Every day.
In fact, we could say that life is nothing more than a stream of never-ending choices, one right after the other. Day in and day out, season after season, year after year, the reality is that we’re not doing much more than making choices. We do this or we do that. Sometimes we even choose to do nothing and keep doing what we’ve already chosen to do.
How are we supposed to know when we’re making the correct choice?
What do we have that’s serving as a reference point while making these decisions?
What, if anything, is influencing the path we choose to follow?
It turns out there are certain things that influence those decisions. We’re all guided by some mixture of knowledge, wisdom, and experience, each with our own specific combination of these qualities and moving in our own unique direction. Each of us has their own life-history, pushing us forward, propelling us through the stream of choices we face every day.
Is there any way we can know that we’ll always make the right choice?
In a word, no.
Statistically speaking, there’s always a chance that we’ll make the worst decision possible in a specific situation. The size of that chance is influenced largely by factors outside our control, by both nature and nurture. Our genes, where we’re born, what point in time we arrive on the scene, the environment we find ourselves in: none of these variables were influenced by us in any way. We had no choice in how these things turned out.
Certainly, we can make conscious decisions to tilt the scales more in our favor -like furthering our education or gaining mastery of a skill- but, for the most part, how we got where we are is mostly out of our hands.
And it’s undeniable that some people get luckier in this regard than others. Some of us are lucky enough to have been born into the right family at the right time, while the rest of us weren’t quite as fortunate. Undoubtedly, our upbringing influences our ability to make quality decisions. Those people fortunate in their upbringing get better odds that they’ll make good decisions.
But that doesn’t guarantee that those people will always make good decisions.
Every one of us makes some bad decisions in our lives; it’s inevitable. No matter how blessed we are with knowledge, wisdom, and experience, there’s always that statistical chance, no matter how small, that we’re going to slip up. Occasionally, our luck runs out. Even longshots hit sometime.
Luck seems to play an outsized role in the movie of our lives, and nowhere can it be more influential than when we make poor decisions. Whether we want to admit it or not, we’ve all made bad decisions in our lives, and for most of us, some of them were bad enough to land us behind bars.
For a small percentage of us who make poor decisions, we find ourselves in the wrong place at the wrong time: our poor decision is out there for all to see. Sometimes the wrong person does see it, and we’re arrested, convicted, and incarcerated. We may not have done anything worse than what other people do, we just found ourselves in the wrong situation.
Bad luck.
We’re the ones that got caught.
It happens.
Some people get lucky in their choices while others pay a price.
Choices.
Choices matter.
Not so much the ones we’ve made already; mostly the ones yet to come.
So, we got unlucky. So what?
The more important question is: Will we continue to keep taking chances when we know our odds aren’t that good or will we consciously choose to move in a different direction? Do we stand pat and go with the status quo or do we bow up and make a change?
Everything that’s happened to us before this moment is pushing us toward making a certain choice. It may be a good choice, or it may be bad, but that’s the direction our stream is moving.
Ultimately, it all comes down to another choice.
So what if we’ve made a bad decision in the past? No matter how big or how small our error, there’s always another choice to make.
If we stop and think about it, the only thing that really matters (to me at least) is the question:
What choice are we going to make next?
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Thanks, Joe
