Choices have been on my mind lately. Choices can range from the mundane to the life changing, they can be easy or painfully difficult. When it comes to your own choices, the difficult ones, how do you come to our decisions? Do you seek a lot of advice? Do you make them on a whim? Perhaps you do a lot of research or seek answers through prayer. Regardless of approaches you may have made in the past you ultimately made a choice. What was the reaction?
Making a choice kind of means we reached a decision, we weighed our options and picked one. Deciding has past. How often though when we share our decisions with those close to us are we met with disappointment, judgement, and in the worse cases shunning? How often do those individuals try to have us reconsider? My message today is “stop it”.
Have you had the experience of making a difficult decision, one you were not certain of but made nonetheless? Have you experienced friends, family, coworkers consistently hinting, implying, or outright telling you that your decision was bad? It is heart wrenching to think you’ve moved past a difficult moment of decision only to be dragged back by others and told you were deceived, or naïve, or a hundred other things. If we find ourselves doing this in response to another’s decision doesn’t this imply we believe ourselves more wise than they? Are we?
Everyone has different life experiences. Not one of us will view things exactly the same way as another and that is something we should celebrate! The world is a better place when there is diversity of thought and respect for each other. I hope that when we have come to make difficult decisions that those close to us have remained close, I hope that we have felt more tenderness than rudeness. I hope we’ve had that friend who has in essence said, “wherever this path takes you, I’m here for you”.
The judgment or criticism we receive doesn’t change our mind, it usually has the opposite effect or if it does change our mind we often end up bitter for it. I have had the misfortune of losing friends due to disagreements and a lack of respect for decisions, it is heartbreaking. Maybe those decisions did bring difficulty and appeared to have been bad ones at first but in the end it was alright. This brings me to my final point.
At the end of the day whatever decisions we make whether they turn out good or bad can be made good. We can learn from those decisions and become better for it. If we are religious we can be brought closer to God. We can have our hearts changed and made more tender toward others. How do I know this? I experienced it. To those of you who are distressed by the decisions you’ve made and the negative reception of them, hold on. I am proud of you that you chose to act. Don’t doubt yourself, move forward, not backward. I respect your decision.
The Author Mommy 