I spend a lot of my time telling myself no, living on a schedule and generally doing my best to make sure everything stays on track and progresses as I want it to. And when it doesn’t? Well I get upset of course, and then I buckle down, analyze, over analyze and figure out best I can to never let it happen again.
I have lived in a self appointed confinement. Full of rules I’ve made, as if life can be boiled down to a simple formula. As if I alone have the power to control life and make it exactly what I want it to be- but only if I never stray from the course I have set. I was always moving, running, racing at a frenetic pace to get to the next thing but then I had a realization- what if I just didn’t? Sure there are some things that must be kept on top of, but what if instead of living in the world of scarcity that I had created for myself, what if I believe that there were endless possibilities for my life?
There are, you know, endless possibilities. There are endless possibilities of things we can do, vocations we can have, and places to live. And you know what else? Most decisions are not life defining. Way may lead on to way as Robert Frost says in his poem, “The Road Not Taken,” but that doesn’t mean that we can’t transfer paths further up the road. We miss a section of a road, but that doesn’t mean we can’t transfer over to it later if we truly regret having not taken it.
What if instead of assuming there is one path for our lives and that no matter what we must stick with it, what if we lived asking, “what next?” What if we dwelt in the possibility of what our lives could be rather than just assuming that this is all there is. Yes, some commitments we do have to live with; our spouse, children, even pets are with us for the long haul! But there are so many possibilities still open to us.
I remember when my husband and I got engaged at the ripe old age of 19, and people asked why? Why tie ourselves down at such a young age? Didn’t we want to travel, and do things, have freedom? The answer was yes we did! We just happened to want to do all those things together! We filtered our marriage through the lense of possibility, of what all we could do together, not what we were giving up; and since we kind of liked each other, we still haven’t found that we missed out on anything!
I think the key to living in possibility is to view your current situations as guardrails rather than gates. Certain options are off limits, lest we go careening off a cliff, but guard rails don’t stop us from turning at safe intersections, and we pass through many more of life’s intersections than we even realize, because our preset gps tells us to go straight, so why wonder what is down the road to the right?
I am choosing to live in the possibility, to see the world through the lense of what can still happen, not living in confinement of the choices I have already made. I choose to see possibilities instead of restrictions. I choose to see roadblocks as something to be overcome, not a sign to turn around and go back to from where I came.
What about you? What do you choose today?