Life is like a game in which players can do whatever they want, making decisions and dealing with consequences of these decisions. It is a game of choice: choose to or choose not to and face the consequences. In all sincerity it’s not a game. It is life. Life is all about making choices.
A girl at the age of 18 smuggled heroin from her country to a third world country but she was caught at the airport and thrown into jail. Her sentence was 12years. While she was in prison she had her regrets. She said to herself $20,000 is not enough money to allow yourself end up in jail, separated from friends family. No amount of money is enough she concluded. She tried to see how she could make meaning out of her life. She began teaching English for free to her fellow prisoners; she thought to herself when I get out of jail, I will go back to school. Because of her dedication to helping people in prison by teaching English she was released 23months after on parole.
She made a choice driven by the need for money and ended up in jail. She chose to affect lives while in prison, this ended up reducing her twelve years sentence to 23months.
She made her choices and it defined her life. Her life became the consequence of her choices.
Choice is an act of choosing between two or more possibilities.
Love is a choice. You either choose to or not to love. Happiness is a choice. You either choose to be happy or not. Pride, humility, forgiveness, friendship, patience, kindness etc. are all choices we must make. Every day, every hour, every minute, every second we make choices whether we like it or not.
Ignorance is a choice. Enlightenment is also a choice. Every choice has a consequence. A choice follows the principle of sowing and reaping. When you sow a choice, you reap a consequence. A good choice produces a good consequence while a bad choice produces a bad consequence.
We are products of the choices we make and the choices we have made in life. When you make a choice, you and you alone enjoy or suffer the consequences. Sometimes others enjoy or suffer with you but they too have a choice.
It is common to hear people say I don’t have a choice. But the truth is you always have a choice. Many are scared of choosing what they believe/perceive to be right because of what people would say; how people would react. They know that such choice would eventually lead them to the right path, but the desire to please others, to belong, to be accepted, to avoid shame, to conceal the truth, to enjoy certain temporal pleasures, to hide keep them from making the right choices.
These are the common excuses that hold us back from making the right choice:
Oh! What would people say?
I would become a laughing stock?
People would laugh at me.
No one would want to talk to me again.
I would be on my own for a longtime.
Where else would I get money from?
Who would take care of me?
How can I live without him/her?
How can I live without this affluence?
How would I cope?
An excuse is a choice in itself. It is a bad choice that yields a bad consequence. How people feel, act or react to our choices in life may only be an initial consequence what matters is the final consequence.
To make the right choice you must tell yourself the truth in all situations, weigh your options and the consequence of every option. Allow your choices to be guided by the truth; by what is right.
Train yourself to be ready to accept the truth and to walk in the truth. You can achieve this by finding out the truth about situations you have not faced in life, the options/choices available and their consequences, then tell yourself what you would do/what you ought to do when such situations arise, never stop telling yourself what you’ll do and how you’ll overcome the challenges that comes with your choice. This way it becomes a part of you and you are now ready to make the right choice.
To make a good choice, you must understand your available options and the consequences to every option. Knowing what the consequence of an action will be before taking that action is wisdom. When you know the consequence, it helps you to know which action to take.
When you choose pleasure over reason, you end up in a mess. When you choose to follow the crowd, rather than do what is right, you end up in a mess.
A choice is always driven by something. Every choice is driven by pain or pleasure, the desire to gain pleasure and the desire to overcome pain. There is a motive behind every choice.
Motives, habits, attitudes, personality, convictions, beliefs etc. determine our choices in life and have already determined a whole lot of choices even before we make them. When you choose a motive, habit, attitude, personality, conviction, belief etc. you have made a chain of choices you cannot control. Some of the life experiences we encounter today are choices we made some ten, twelve, five, six years ago. When you choose one thing, by implication you have chosen many other things. When you make a choice, by implication you have made many other choices.
The game of choice is a circle-list of choices, you either gamble through it to pick one or weigh every option/choice and it’s consequence before you, or weigh only one or two options and choose, or weigh only popular options and pick, or choose options people expect you to choose, or ask somebody to choose for you not minding the consequence, or not make a choice at all and face the consequence of not choosing at all.
Choice is about intuition, patience and perseverance. Some say choice is a game in as much as life is a game. There would be obstacles and disappointments like you see in the game. But the satisfaction of reaching the end will compensate for the hardship encountered.
If you make wrong choices or choices that do not give the desired result, you’ll have a choice either to start over and make a new choice and live out the consequences of your previous choice or be enslaved by it and give up on making new choices.
The truth is your giving up is a choice of choosing to suffer the consequences of your previous choice while creating new consequences. Choose wisely.
No comments :
Post a Comment