I've been thinking about choices a lot lately. Every day I am faced with a gazillion choices, most of them are benign, but lately I have come face to face with choices that seem far reaching. So I am trying something out of my comfort zone... a little poem or stream of consiousness to get some of these thoughts out. Beware I am not a poet. I just pretend to be one every so often. Before I even open my eyes each morning, during that time when sleep starts to fade and my consiousness makes itself known, I face choices.
Do I find a way to rise up and become present in another day given me?
Or do I roll over and avoid the menacing cold that awaits my bare feet padding across the wood kitchen floors.
I can fight my urge to crawl under the covers, or I can enter into the day with gratitude, seeking first my God and His will for this day.
Such a simple choice really. But rife with consequences.
Under the covers, fear grows and before I know it, I forget that I even have choices to make. Life, the world, my mind go on auto pilot trapped in a dizzying ride that I can't seem to stop.
Husband, Children, School, Finances, Relationships, Priorities, Jobs, Phone Calls, Laundry, Housing, Worth, Identity, Attitude, on and on they go whirling about, the big and the small.
Or surrender. If I open myself to the will of God I am on my way to a day filled not with the promise of simpleness or absence of drama, but with the promise that I am not alone.
The latter allows me to enter into the realness of my life, the life planned for me and only me, a place that requires a ruthless trust.
Choose the former and I have entered into my world, a world of ego and selfishness that can cause my heart to harden against anyone not willing to do life my way. A place where hearts are heard cracking like heavy ice on a sapling during a winter storm.
It takes an enormous amount of courage and strength to choose to abandon self. An overwhelming ability to open my hands in surrender.
This choice goes beyond so much of what I often desire. So much of the time I choose without a thought and when the choices become constricted based on a poor decision, I kick and scream and demand.
I want. I want. I want. Don't get in my way because I will get. And in a flash I can take an unforbidden fork in the road that leads me to destruction and despair.
Then like the depraved soul I am, I say I don't know how I got here. What are these ruins I see, these ruins of living in deceit and fantasy.
It is at these desperate times, through my tearful eyes that I see the key. The willingness key which opens the door that contains the lasso. It is with this lasso that I rope my magical thoughts and bind them up to throw to the vultures who love to feed on such things.
When the last of those thoughts fly away, I am set free. In freedom, I can choose wisely again. I can choose to live the mundane, the dry and know that this hum-drum way of life won't be my marching orders forever.
The band will change songs and tomorrow the melody might be fresh, airy and light. If only I can choose the steps that lead the right way, maybe not the only way, but one that will get me to the correct destination.
My choices make up the stepping stones of my journey and so many of them dictate where the road leads. Up the craggy mountains where the view is exquisite or to the dark valleys where intriguing shadows await me with their lies.
Like the sirens on the cliffsides, I may not have the choice in what comes my way each day, but I can choose to sail away from those sirens. Choose to go against what I want to do because I can already see what happened to the ones who have answered their call.
So each day my hope is that I choose to pad across that cold, wooden floor one step at a time, aware but not overwhelmed. Wise but not egotistical. Fully willing. Fully surrendered.