We all face many crossroads in life, but making decisions never gets easier.
I have been mulling over a lot of choices lately. Which way should I be going? What move will take me down the road that I am supposed to move down to find success, happiness, love, or destiny?
Life has a way of putting you into positions of choice. Some are minor, and we make them without much fanfare and move on with our day. Then others seem to be huge decisions that will affect the path of your life forever.
These are the times that you can feel that you are at a crossroads, one direction, and your life will be this, the other, and your life will be that, straight ahead, another thing, and of course, there is the option to return the way you came. The choice may seem easy, but you know it will affect everything about your life, personally, financially, and your happiness level. There is no simple way to make this choice.
Magic of Choices
It takes little research to find mythological stories about
Sam and Dean will not be able to help you make your own crossroads choices. Unfortunately, it is all up to you.
Crossroads and what they actually may represent in your life. Symbolically they can represent the location where two realms come together and touch so that it is representative of a place that allows a more precise vision into two worlds at once. The problem is that you are neither in one nor another, and the only way to move forward is to choose.
It is believed in many cultures that the location between worlds is a prime location for magical happenings and visits from spirits. There are many different stories and songs in modern Western Culture about meeting with a crossroads demon and selling your soul to make your choice have a positive outcome. One quick viewing of a Supernatural season will teach you all you need to know about crossroads demons.
Unfortunately, the magic of being at a mental crossroads will not last forever, and you must make a choice. Perhaps it is because it is so difficult to choose that societies and cultures have created stories about magic. Because the choice will ultimately end up either exceptionally good or bad, those decisions on the outside might seem like they are controlled by forces other than simple life.
Unfortunately, there will be no supernatural assistance in making a choice, and you have to do the best that you can all by yourself. That is the real magic of these moments, the option to move one way or another.
Make Your Choice, Take your Chances, Accept Results
Finally, there will be a moment when the choice is made, moving forward onto the unknown or untested ground every day. Some will work out great, and others will teach you something about yourself that you need to know. The one thing that is paramount to remember is that a choice will
Make your choices, pay your money, take your ride, and see where it takes you.
be made each day about the path you are going down.
If you do nothing, that is a choice, and the resulting experience will come your way. Sometimes that is the best thing to do. However, standing still most often will not get you anywhere positive, and it will stop you from reaching for what you want. There are only so many moments for peering down each option and weighing the apparent pros and cons.
In reality, we know nothing about the long-term experiences that each road has to offer. So make your best guess and start moving down it, and the experiences will come, most often the ones you need at the time, and it is vital to stay strong and realize that there will be learning experiences in all of them.
Sometimes there are seemingly opposing things that are very positive for you. Life is about choices each moment, finding the courage to accept love over fear, and meeting your daily challenge head-on. Strikeout down that road and let life happen, good, bad, or indifferent, you will be the owner of that destiny, and like it or not, it belongs to you anyway.
A song about Choices by Boo Ray— a Sea of lights a gentle breeze, take me to Los Angeles. ——All your choices.
One of my favorite Don McLean songs from a long time ago reminds me of traveling down these roads.
Life should be about the people and the things you love. As a child, I understood this. Life was about doing the things I enjoyed doing with the people who made me feel good about myself. The activities I took part in resulted in fond memories. I thought everything and everyone was put here for my benefit and to add joy to my life because that is what they did. Then life started to weave its web of experience on me. Things don’t always go exactly as you plan; sometimes, you experience failure and have to start over or readjust your sails. Sometimes people don’t do the things you feel are in your best interest, and challenging moments teach us. These lessons are needed to become the best person you can be, but a part of your heart gets wounded when you attach it to an outcome that doesn’t happen. This is suffering, and life is full of it.
These wounds hurt, and subconsciously we want to avoid them again. We do this by building a “barrier” around our hearts. Call it a wall, a prison, or whatever metaphor you choose, but the goal is to protect ourselves from pain. That is the experience of my life. I am here to warn you, don’t do it. Each barrier we create is a limit on us, not protection. I have learned the hard way the truth of this.
Crush
The number one desire of all people is to be loved and accepted for exactly who we are. My life has been a search for that kind of experience. Sometimes I have thought I had found it, only to find it was not meant to be. Early on, the fear of this pain started me building a wall around my heart to protect it from these experiences. There are two choices when you have been hurt, retreat and withdraw from the chance you might be broken. Or be brave enough to put yourself back out there to see what will happen again.
If you don’t play the game, you can never win. Being hurt is not desirable; it takes time to heal after each failed attempt. I have certainly felt like giving up on finding a relationship that works. We start to think we are broken beyond repair. But then you realize that life is a game that is played to its conclusion, which doesn’t happen until the end. I have built a wall stone by stone only to realize that walls don’t protect. They isolate. Isolation is no way to live your life. It is very safe but not very rewarding. It is time to break down the wall. You will be confined by the very things you built to keep you protected. Breaking chains is what true freedom is all about.
Laying Yourself On the Line
There is only one way for your heart to experience the things it needs, and that is to let it be free and allow it to be vulnerable. Even though many people can hurt you, there are more who will not, and they will never walk through your door if you don’t open it for them. The barriers we build to protect ourselves are just self-made prisons, and being a prisoner to the fear you might get hurt is no positive way to exist. You are suspended in time and space with no chance to love or to b loved.
Let your heart go free and see what happens. At some point in your experience, you will have to stay unhappy, full of regret, anger, or fear, or let your best attributes rise and share them. Through this effort, you will find fulfillment and joy in life. The decision to allow the barriers to fall and be open is the most challenging and scary decision you will ever make. The alternative is to live no life at all and be isolated. This choice is yours. Build your wall higher, or let it fall entirely. Just one of the many choices we make every day. They will all define you and lead to your experiences in each moment. You are responsible for your life choices and the walls you allow to be constructed around yourself or those you raze to the ground. You alone.
“There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we erect.” – Ronald Reagan.
“We should be breaking down barriers, not building walls.” -said Ted Cruz.
“Let us tear down the walls of our hearts to tear down the walls of concrete.”
“Do not judge your day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds that you plant.”– Robert Louis Stevenson
It is only natural to look back and reflect on the events of your life and attempt to give them meaning in your life. Positive and negative things happen in life, and there is always a lesson to learn. I have had many of these over the past year, some big and some small but all significant. This writing is a short attempt to list these lessons hoping someone else will benefit from my experiences. Each is a wish to you that you will find joy every morning when you wake up and carry that feeling throughout your day. Life is full of situations that take our happiness. You deserve to be joyful and have a heart that sings in the light of hope, which breaks in every new day.
Life is too short to be unhappy.
It doesn’t matter if it is in your job, your relationship, or just living life from day today. If you are unhappy with something continually, you need to make changes. Our experience is finite and short and could end at any moment. It is too valuable a time to be spent doing something you don’t enjoy or with people who are toxic or make you feel bad.
Choose the activities and people who build you up that make you feel valued and happy in your daily life. Once you find them, enjoy them while they are there because they may not be there forever. One day at a time is the only way to live. Enjoy things at the moment and understand that is all there is. Tomorrow is not guaranteed to anyone. Yesterday is gone, and you can’t get it back. Enjoy the moments. Life is too short to be unhappy all the time.
Taking Action Will Change Your Life
Taking action is one of the essential igniters of positive change. You can plan all you want, weigh all the options, and compare the pros and cons for weeks and months, but only through action can you find out what will work and what will not. There is a power in this knowledge that empowers you, and it defeats fear because what is fear but a thought, worrying about what might happen?
With action, you know what will happen, which will change your life. Actions don’t always work out the way you envision, but they still bring answers, and in the knowledge, there is power and in power is an inner strength that guides a joyous life. It takes courage to take action, but the alternative to brave decisions is to live a half-life of thought. You will never know, dreaming continually of what might happen or what you could be. Take your action, place your bet, push your chips to the middle of the table, and see what kind of cards you get. At worst, you will learn. At best, you will become that person of your dreams.
Gratitude should be a part of Life.
I know that gratitude is supposed to be a part of your life. Here are the things I experienced with gratitude this year. First, taking a moment to be grateful for things builds a genuine appreciation. You realize that you have great things in your life and your mindset naturally moves from one of lack to one of abundance. You never know when something will change, turning your life upside down. Some things you love will leave, and it is up to you to carve happiness out of the life left behind you. Be grateful for what you have right now and the joy it brings you.
Begin each day with a mental list of all the people and things you are grateful for today. That mindset will allow you to look more objectively at life. Too often create an automated list of all the problems we are facing and difficulties in life, and we are taking our focus on the issues we have. Where focus goes, energy flows. Like all people, there were difficulties this year for me, but maintaining my gratitude for what I do has, allowed me to survive. It was not easy at times, but I am still here.
We Must change limiting Beliefs
I have been on the trail of my own limiting beliefs for many years, and this year I have had experience changing them and seeing that change play out in my life. Our limiting beliefs are built as we develop early in life, and they work to create our experience in life and lead to what we expect from that experience. It depends on the message we received and how it was delivered. y We are taking in a lot of
Limiting beliefs lead to the same old thinking and disappointing results, a closed-loop or negative feedback mindset. Change is up to you!!
Information and figuring out where we fit in the world. As children, the conclusions we come to are hard-wired into our subconscious and rule our actions for the rest of our lives, unless we change them.
Changing a limiting belief can be a challenge. You can do it through hypnosis, repetition of affirmations, and sometimes direct old willpower. (Having enough) I have changed my own beliefs to some degree and want to see what I want in life. I have also experienced setbacks and heartbreaks because of the limits I placed in my mind. You can change. You can do this new way, and it doesn’t have to take a long time to do it. You have to be willing to change how you think about things and desire a change in your life experience.
People are Doing the Best They Can
Many people have come into my life over the years, some for a short time, and some seemingly for the duration. Each one has brought a lesson of some kind because all people come ready-made with addresses attached. How to live, how not to live, do this, or don’t do that, this is how you treat others, and how never to treat someone else. These lessons have been there throughout my life, but I have never really seen them with the clarity I do now. Pain is a great teacher, and it has ingrained its lessons in my life.
Even the meanest, least pleasant person you meet has a lesson for you. It might be as simple as don’t ever make others feel the way this person makes people think. Or it could be more complicated, but look for the lesson in each person you see each day and be conscious of the class that you are teaching others each day. The lessons you teach others are your legacy and the things that will be revisited you in your life. When you have a choice, be kind, understanding, and considerate of the needs of others. But never compromise who you are to please someone else. When you do, you cease being you, which is a crime.
Everyone Sees Life Differently
The reality experienced in life is different for everyone. You and I can share the same thing and have two different interpretations of the event. Our biases, beliefs, understanding, and experiences will color every event that happens. People generally believe what they want about people, events, and things. Two individuals can look at a star-filled sky. And one sees the wonder of the universe, and the other sees darkness. Be understanding of these differences and talk about them with those you share things with. Through communication, your experience can be broader, and you can, in turn, make someone else see more.
Over the past year, I have seen more of this. I have learned that it doesn’t do any good to proclaim the correctness of your perspective because if others have a different experience, no words you say can change their minds and vice versa. Be open to the views of other people. They may teach you something. Things don’t always have to be labeled as right or wrong, but they all can teach you something. Growth is the purpose of this life, and other people will allow you to grow.
Questions are Our most Powerful Tools
when you ask a question, your mind seeks an answer. It is a natural way to gain information, but items work in moving your thoughts and mind toward places you want to go and things you want to accomplish. How can it get better than this? How can this work out better than I could have imagined? What lesson is in this experience for me? What should I do next? What are the actions I should take now?
These are just some of the questions, and then the secret is to let the answers keep coming to you. The first one might be the best, but it might not, and it might just be easiest. Keep seeking answers because once you have accepted the solution, the possibilities are ended too, and there is nothing else you can create from that.
If you examine your answers but keep seeking them, you will find there are others. I have learned that as learners, we have been conditioned to accept the first answer we come to and file it away. Ask questions in the new year, and never stop looking for the answers for the rest of your life.
Some of My Favorite Books
For me, there is a list of books that have influenced me and my thoughts this year. Each of these added to my life and will add to yours, and I highly recommend them. Reading expands your mind, makes you think, and allows you to change your life.
The Alchemist- Paulo Coello
The Four Agreements- Don Miguel Ruiz
The Biology of Belief- Bruce Lipton
The Greatest Miracle in the World- Og Mandino
Being You! Changing the World- Dain Heer
Awaken the Giant Within- Tony Robbins
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success- Carol Dweck
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People- Steven Covey
Reading is the best way to take in information and expand your mind. You can learn from the mistakes of others and glean wisdom from their experience. Often you can find your way through troubles and get a positive compass reading to avoid the pitfalls of your journey.
No matter what you have been through, life will continue, and what you learn from your experience is up to you and the story you tell yourself about it. The report will create a belief, and that idea will work in your life. Whether those stories are positive or negative is up to you.
“Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.”– C. S. Lewis Trust God Quotes
“It takes strength to step enthusiastically into each day of our lives. This strength comes more readily on some days than on others, but every day makes demands on us.”— Karen Casey, The Promise of a New Day
“Every day that you open your eyes is a new day and another day to get it right.” Jean Renee Porter, A New Day
There is nothing as exciting as a new beginning. Reading yesterday, I came across this theme that is often a problem for me and many others. Endings are hard. All things in the history of the world have had a beginning, a middle, and an end. That is the way of all things. Often, when the end is harsh, a lingering regret remains, which does not allow a person to let go and move forward. The item you can be sure of is that right now, whatever is happening in your life is changing in some way and moving closer to its inevitable end. We should be grateful in many ways because, without endings, there would be no new beginnings.
Painful Endings
I have experienced some endings in the job world that have been very difficult and painful. Some have looked to the past with longing and wished I could go back to the security of that situation or the parts of the job that I enjoyed. However, looking into the past only brought sadness and regret. Like many endings, there is no way to move onto something else that perhaps will provide you with greater enjoyment and fulfillment current situation is ended. Every new beginning comes from an ending of something.
Accepting this can be difficult if it involves a relationship or even death because the emotions around these events will never seem optimistic in any way. Yet if you analyze the situation, there is a simple choice for you to accept what has happened and move on with your life or to refuse to accept it and live in a past of regret and unhappiness. The choice is always yours.
Tough Relationships
When it comes to relationships, imperfect endings can provide you with the learning experiences needed to propel you toward the person who can fulfill your needs. It is a matter of perspective. That relationship ended because it lacked in some way. There was something that wasn’t fulfilling or favorable for you.
If you knew that within a day, the person who would fulfill every one of your needs was going to enter your life, would you be all that sad?
In effect, you are holding on to an unfulfilled past at the expense of a complete future. We often lack the perspective we are in life right now, feeling pain and just trying to survive. If we could rise above life and look down and observe our paths and the next steps in front of us, we would be much more accepting of the change. All things in life are generally working toward your greatest good, and fear makes us address things any other way.
Hard Times
We are afraid of the hard times in life because they are not fun to go through, and they hurt and are painful. Yet without these moments of challenge, many people would lack the depth and character that will make them the people they are destined to be. Perhaps a perspective needed to be adjusted, or a belief required to be changed to reach their full potential.
Not everything in life will work out how you want it to, but it will give you something that you needed to know to reach your full potential. It is a fact that no matter what situation you are currently in, it will pass one day and cease to exist. It may be in a day or many years, but even the hardest of times will end and fade into memory. They will leave scars, but those scars will help build the character that will allow you to be the best person you can be if you adhere to their lessons.
Endings can be painful, but there is an excitement of a new beginning that will provide each person with a glimmer of hope in their heart that a dream may come true because of this endeavor. A person will never know unless they dare to accept the ending and the strength to take the step into the future.
So much of our lives revolve around the stories we tell. Not only the ones we tell others about our past but, more importantly, the stories we tell ourselves about the past. These stories about our perception of our history tend to color and temper our expectations for ourselves today. What is the value of this? It is time to let go of history and move forward.
Faulty at Best
One of the things that I am sure of is that the history we remember and the stories we tell are not very accurate and controlled by the beliefs we choose to entertain. Memory is not a very trustworthy tool to use when looking at the past. When five people witness an accident or another event, the stories will only have a base of consistency when interviewed separately. That is because we all have biases and beliefs that influence how we interpret the events in our lives. Accept that is true, and you can move forward without being attached to the results of stories from the past. Your memory is faulty, and you can’t trust that you remember things accurately at all. So living your life based on these lessons is faulty as well. Let go of history and move forward.
It Limits Today
Another reason to move past the stories that you let define you is that they will limit you. Focusing on the stories of the past that make up your character and experience establishes your identity. Who knows what new information and experience will do to change who you are and what you believe. Clinging to the past as an identifier for who you are will limit who you might become. It is like wearing a costume that you can’t get out of. Look at it, learn from it and discard it. There are no reasons to accept limits in your life.
You Can’t Change It
One fact that is irrefutable is that no matter what has happened in the past, there is no way to change it. No matter what has happened, good or bad, it is what it is, and changing it is not an option. Many people spend their lives reliving old positive memories and glory days to remind themselves that they felt good about themselves at one point. Or they spend a lot of time reliving mistakes and reminding themselves of the problems they caused themselves, like a badge of explanation for the problems faced today. Neither of these options is healthy or allows you to move forward. Your past can’t be changed, altered, or adjusted in any way. To think otherwise is a delusion. Learn from it and put it away, understanding that the only moment that matters is the one that you are in right now.
Our personal history can be an interesting thing to visit. There are people we met who we learned from, either good or bad. Some events affected the way we view life. Some have allowed me to see the potential in all situations. Others make me wonder about the honesty of people. Regardless of the value, all of the past needs to be put away, so there is room for new growth experiences coming to you at this moment and in all the moments of the years to come. One’s vision can only be clear without the shaded lens of the past.
On Halloween 2019 it seems appropriate I look at ways to get rid of the ghosts in my life. The past is a constant companion, it is always there, reminding, motivating or maybe even taunting us. The ghosts of things done, actions taken or not taken lead to the behavior we undertake today. Reflection on these things allows a person to choose between being swallowed by the past, never able to move forward or to release the past and move forward with new experiences.
There is a continual connection between you and your past. Hopefully visiting the ghosts of your past will allow you to put them behind you and move forward into the best version of yourself. Letting go of the past will set you free. These are some trips to the past that have haunted me on my journey and I need to put to rest once and for all.
The Ghosts of the Past
We all have Ghosts from our past visit us daily
These are the most prevalent visitors from the realm of shadows. Haunted by the thoughts of events, things, people, and relationships that occurred years ago, yet are as dead today as they can be. These apparitions come in the thoughts about what we used to be, how we used to act and where we used to go.
I have been visited by these ghosts more often than I would like to admit. The reminders of youth, love lost, words that should have been said and mistakes made. They can be painful and they can provide you with a wonderful, escape from today to a time in the past when things were less confusing or less trying and we felt closer to the best version of ourselves.
If you keep the ghosts from the past in proper context they aren’t bad for you. There is no problem with remembering times of happiness and learning the valuable lessons that the past teaches you. The trouble comes when you idealize the past and feel that those ghosts are somehow real. They are not, they are gone and they are never coming back as you remember them.
This can be a painful realization for some people because the past has become such a utopia for us but there is a liberation in understanding this as well. The past is gone, so there is room for new adventures that will give us the platform to become the best version of ourselves.
Love is the worst and most powerful of these memories.
As time goes by you tend to idealize those people that you loved in the past. When those that are currently in your life, do something that doesn’t live up to expectations, you remember someone else from the past that would never treat you that way in your mind. The reasons the relationship didn’t work out are pushed aside and replaced with an idealistic memory that no person could ever live up to.
The thing to remember is that all of those ghosts are just thoughts in your mind and have no more power over you than any other ghost. They can’t grab you or make you feel bad about the way things are now unless you allow them to.
Leave the ghosts in the past where they belong. You will never be that young again, you will never have a relationship like that again, you will never be in that situation again. Accept this as a good thing, learn from the ghosts of your past, but do not give them any power over your feelings and thoughts today, because they are not real.
Look honestly at the experiences you have had. Allow yourself to feel whatever emotions come to the surface. Let them go. That is about all any of us can do. Once you let them go, room is created for new things.
Psychologists: Scrooge’s Transformation Parallels Real Life-Changing Experiences