| Remember those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books about 15 years ago? You'd read, and after a while you'd have to make a choice as to where the story was going. That's exactly how life is. People make choices everyday to do this or that, and those decisions lead to others down the road, and so on and so on. The choices we make shape the person we will be. They form our character. Sometimes we make bad decisions that lead to other bad decisions. Some people are lucky and make all the right choices. There are no good or bad people, we all have the potential for good or evil. What's separates people is their pattern of choices. Right choices are not always easy. It's cliched, but the righteous path is almost always the hardest. It sometimes means sacrificing something now in order to ensure a proper outcome in the future. There are no guarantees in life, which makes foresight something of a rare commodity. Wrong choices are almost always very easy to make because they're usually self-serving choices. They usually forego the well-being of others to make us happy. These choices lead to a false sense of security, because you may think you're happy but a life full of these selfish choices is a hollow existence to say the least. What makes people more confusing, is that they don't always make one choice or another. They may occasionally make one or the other that throws people off and keeps people from understanding what kind of character they really posess. Some may say that doing things right is not a 'sometimes' kind of thing. And they may have point, but in real life choices we make can't be judged so simply at times. There's all kinds of factors that influence our decision making- necessities, history, conditions, the people that are going to be affected, and a host of other variables. Sometimes we try to do the right so hard, but it only comes out to be the wrong thing and therefore defeats our best effort. You have to want to do the right thing. You have to want to understand the effect your actions will have on others around you. I have gone through the selfish phase of my life, and there are a lot of angry people in my past. I will forever regret those decisions and times where I lost my way. But I will tell you that those times have only made my conviction to make the right choices in the future stronger. Right or wrong, good or bad, these are not traits carried in DNA. They are conditions of character that are formed by decisions we make. It's never too late to make the right choice but, like I said before, you have to want to. The Rain King 6/30/02 |