Choice

Not all stories begin well... Mine does though, so that's lucky.

I often describe my childhood with much pride and gratitude, but that wasn't always the case. My current view of the past I attribute to a lucky mixture of rapid emotional and spiritual maturing. The journey to get to this point of growth, the place where you can look back and see the moment your life changed, for better or worse, is something everybody can and should do. The person you’ll find you’ve become will almost always surprise you. The future is always a grey area, and I believe only faith can really control where we are headed. Otherwise, frankly, it’s more of a crap-shoot for most of us. I understand I have so much more to learn, and so much more growth to undergo, but that's kind of exciting. I have dreams. Since I drive this vessel of a body, I can be in charge of its direction… to some extent, at least. There is always the unknown. And isn’t that great? The unknown is probably the biggest reason people even try at all; what's the point of struggling, of fighting to achieve our dreams when we already know the outcome of that war?

Dreaming was never something I did a lot of growing up. Aside from the typical "I wish I could fly!" stuff, of course. Maybe it was a side effect of growing up in a somewhat abusive home. When you are told often as a child that you will amount to nothing, you start believing it. And so I simply survived. I think survival was the theme of my life's direction for a long time. From early self-awareness to a point in my early twenties, I simply existed. I worked only as hard as absolutely necessary to get by, never more. I squeezed in as much fun as I could (a universal must for young advancing humans), but never excelled or left any lasting mark. 

A spiritual awakening changed everything for me. Some of the building blocks of that awakening included making peace with my dying father, getting my heart broken once (or more), and problems with addiction.

I’m not sure what it is about pain and suffering that forces us to make that choice: To break free and leap beyond yourself, and become someone you didn’t know you could be. Or, alternatively, to sink to a new depth of lifelessness, a self-destruction previously thought impossible. Tough as it is, “choice” is the only word for it. I have seen it many times in my life already. Two separate people may go through many or all of the same trials in their separate lives; one becomes a vibrant, optimistic, happy person, while the other is a miserable wretch. In the wise words of my beautiful wife, “Happiness is a choice, not a right.” I think that that is absolutely true. So much of what and who we are comes down to daily choice. Everything else is noise, just distractions we can use to blame our state of mind (exempting, of course, the sick and afflicted.)

So that’s what I did. I made a choice. To stop believing the lies I was first told as a child, and then the same lies I continued telling myself. A simple one it might seem, but not for me. It opened doors for me I never knew existed!

That choice, that beginning is what led me to all of the amazing things in my life today.

The first step is choice. You always have agency, and you always will.

So choose.