Choose Your Life

You’re playing with your daughter, and she’s chasing you around the apartment. Her shrieks of laughter and delight fill the room.

“What a wonderful way to spend an evening,” you pause and think to yourself. “What could be better?”

Ooops, she almost catches you. You spin to “escape”.

Except your foot catches the leg of a table. Hard. With force.

Pain shoots up your leg, and you stumble backwards.

Choose.

—

You’ve been out running errands all day, and you just want to get home. You can’t wait to see your family. And you’re definitely ready for a hot supper.

A train pulls into the train station, and you get on. Just a short ride away now.

But the train doesn’t move. It stays standing. Minutes pass.

Eventually, the conductor announces there’s a broken train on the rail ahead. Your trip home just became a lot longer.

Choose.

—

You’ve been rushing to meet a last minute deadline on a project, and today’s the final day. It’s a major project, and you’re responsible for getting it done on time.

Everything is ready to go except for one final piece – a bit of work that you’ve been waiting for your coworker to complete. When you checked with him the other day, he’d assured you the work would be done on time.

A bit anxious, you give him a call.

“Oh sorry,” he says, “I’m not going to be able to get it to you for another week.”

Choose.

—

Life constantly offers you choices.

Sometimes you get two options, and you have to pick one. But more often than not, life simply presents one option.

Here it is. Deal with it.

So how will you respond? Will you complain, hide, or react with anger? Or will you accept the situation for what it is? Will you embrace it as part of your life? Will you choose a powerful, heroic response?

The response is always up to you. The choice is always yours.

It can be tempting to only choose the more “positive” situations. But being whole means embracing your whole life. Being fully alive means being alive in all moments. It means choosing everything – not because it’s what you prefer, but because it’s what’s offered.

In the end, everything you face is your life. The only question is, will you choose it?

—

You’re out for a walk in quiet of the morning. All is calm. All is peaceful.

“Can the day start any better than this?” you wonder.

Then you look up.

In the east, the sun begins to rise, igniting the distant clouds into beautiful streaks of reds and yellows.

It’s simply magnificent.

Choose.

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