When faced with a decision, choose the path that feeds your soul. – Dorothy Mendoza Row

You cannot change your destination overnight, but you can change direction overnight. – Jim Rohn

Lately I’ve been thinking about how even the smallest decisions can have cataclysmic ramifications in our lives. And that got me thinking about the decisions we make everyday, about who we are, what we do, and how we engage with the world. After all, life is about millions of choices and each one plays its part in reconstructing our inner and outer lives. We decide who we will be, and who we won’t, by the everyday choices we make. So what are some of your choices? Do you take time to watch the moon rise or go for a late night walk? Do you laugh a lot? Do you smile and engage with others? Are you easily frustrated or have your nose glued to your phone? Each choice we make creates not only who we are but how we experience the people and places around us.

Think back ten years to what you were doing, how you felt, what occupied you, and who you hung out with. How many of those things or people are still in your life, just as they were? My guess is not many, if any. That’s because our lives center around transformation and metamorphosis, we are constantly changing and evolving whether we recognize it or not. This, in fact, is the very nature of life, and we either evolve or we die. Maybe not a physical death but certainly the death of our soul can happen when we ignore what matters most to us again and again. The truth is we can’t have it all. It’s impossible to remain mired in the past while stepping into our future. Something has to go, whether it’s old ideas or ways of thinking, behaviors that don’t support our best interests, or what we expect from ourselves.

It’s really that simple. So here’s the question, what will you choose? It often ends up that the things we believe define us aren’t really our truth, they are simply misconceptions we’ve been carrying around for whatever reasons. When we see ourselves clearly we can step onto a new path or make a new choice. Some things we are holding onto need to be stripped away in order to get at our authentic truth.

It’s surprisingly easy to sabotage or stifle what’s in us that wants to evolve into something more because evolution is uncomfortable. And if we are successful in holding ourselves back we can get lost in what was or might have been and miss out on all we can become. Each of us has infinite potential but it needs to be nurtured. And that requires tremendous courage because it takes guts to let the old constructs crumble.

Life always seems to be asking us difficult questions and we need determination and depth of awareness to formulate our answers. The hard truth is that sometimes the answers we need most come in medicine that is hard to swallow. We are asked to do what we believe is impossible or sacrifice what we think we cannot. And then we are asked to trust and to surrender even when everything seems to be falling to pieces. This is how we evolve. The old saying, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, is a hardcore truth.

So take the time to roam around in some new possibilities of what your life could look like. See your life from a different perspective, with a larger view in mind. Let new ideas have a a chance to be heard. Our lives can change in an instant, we need to make sure who we really are has a part in the process of what comes next.

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