« March 2007 | Main | May 2007 »
I figured I would try my hand once again at writing poetry. Any advice you can offer is appreciated.
I just hope you kinda like it. Here goes.
C'est la vie
The ocean
Never asked any of us to drown,
But when it surrounds us
We really have no choice.
Maybe
The ocean
Could try
A little harder
To help.
I got to spend some time with an old friend this weekend. It was really great to see her, but I have, since then, been thinking on what we talked about. You see, she is at a crossroads in her life, as a lot of us seem to be lately, and is having trouble deciding the right path. It's funny that she approached me with this problem, because the last time she did we were still in high school and trying to decide where to go to college, and I told her to flip a coin. She flipped, went to that school, and everything worked out great. Being reminded of all this made me REALLY think.
"Life decisions" are weird. We always have to be extra careful with these as they, by definition, affect the rest of our lives, and no one wants to be locked into something because of a decision he or she made 10 years ago (e.g. pilot training, the Air Force in general, ANY career!). But back in high school, we just flipped a coin and now she has even MORE options as to where she goes next.
That made me wonder how much our big decisions REALLY affect us. It seems to me that if we really, really want to do something farther on down the road, we simply will, regardless of where we are right now. Maybe there isn't really are "right" path, as we are all destined to go from A to B no matter what we do.* The hardest life decisions, then, seem to be when there are several good decisions, as bad decisions are usually easier to identify than we give them credit for. But if all we have to worry about are good options, then why worry at all?
If I could answer that question, though, I probably would not have spent so much of my recent past questioning my current situation. The fact of the matter is, however, that my big life choices have very seldom limited my future options. More often than not, my options increase, and the majority of them are GREAT opportunities that allow me to pursue more in my life without forcing me to give up anything I opted against.
Are there bad choices in life? Sure, that's an easy question. But as long as we avoid those bad choices, the paths our lives take aren't necessarily as narrow as we generally believe our decisions make them. So do we give ourselves too much credit on the effects of our choices? I don't know for sure, but it would not surprise me.
* I should caveat this by saying that I am only a partial fatalist, as I believe that we affect our lives, I am just not sure to what extent.