Thoughts

The path I want to walk is often in the exact opposite direction of the path I choose to walk. Maybe it is symptomatic of my state of heart. It is not for man to determine his steps… merely his direction. I pray for detours, not dead ends.

Never hold a knife, when you should be holding a lamp. Encouragement, love, understanding and forgiveness soften harder hearts than mine, where harsh words and criticism merely slice flesh to the bone. To build is a greater accomplishment than to destroy.

Deal or No Deal

I sometimes find myself watching the television show Deal or No Deal when my brain is tired, and I don’t want to think anymore. I find something intriguing about the premise for the show, and the utter predictability of the outcome. It is a struggle much like the one that each of us enters into the day we are born. Some of us are luckier than others, some of us choose all the right cases, some of us don’t, and still end up ahead. Luck is only as good as the intellect that wields it. Proverbially, it isn’t what you have; it’s what you do with it. It seems to me, that part of the human condition is to continually want more than what we have. Are any of us really content? And if one of us were content, would not the rest of humanity hound them until they too discovered the “ambition” to also want more? We use key words like aspiration, drive, enterprise, desire, dream, purpose, goals, and ambition. We desire to be with someone who “knows what they want” and “has goals and a drive to achieve”. We want the person who “has it all figured out”, who has “their success planned out and is working the plan”.

There comes a time in a person’s life, where they hold in their hands the keys for happiness… where things line up and start to make sense. It is the moment we see after it has passed us by, where hindsight tells us we either made the right decision, or we messed up big time. It is the seed of destruction or of bliss… depending on how we water it. In the TV show, it is the moment when the payout is at its peak, where the contestant decides either to walk away, or continue on. If they continue on, and choose the wrong cases, they could end up with nothing. If they continue on and choose the right ones, they might make more money. But what is most interesting, and telling of a person’s character, are the decisions they make once the wrong stuff starts to happen. Once they realize that they made the wrong decision, their luck has turned and the payouts start to decrease. Some of them carry on, with faith that luck will return, and sometimes it does. Some of them are so focused on the loss, that they stop playing the game. Some people will play the game all the way to the end of the line, throw rationality out the window, and go home with five dollars. But with each and every one of them that play the game past the turning point, there is a moment of realization that flashes across their face. When the knowledge that they went one step too far, hits them like the smell of rotting fish. It may just be money, and it may just be a TV show, but we all know it happens in real life too. When given the opportunity, we make a choice between risking all that we have right now, for what we could have behind door number two. Some of us have the stomach for the risk… others of us cringe at the thought. But aren’t we all motivated by fear? Fear of losing, fear of what others think, fear of being alone, fear of being poor, fear of not being remembered, fear of regret, fear of losing control, ultimately, fear of not having it all.


I guess as I look back at my own journey, I am still left wondering if there was a point that I should have stopped looking for something better. Can one ever really stop searching? Or are we destined to be confined within the bars of discontentment for the entirety of our human existence? Is it inevitable that we destroy the good in our lives, to constantly go one step further than what’s good for us? Or is there a point at which we can truly realize, this is really as good as it’s going to get. Perhaps there is always the risk of missing out. I believe that we will never truly know what is around the next corner, but happiness isn’t something that befalls us by accident. It is a choice. At the very core of humanity, there is choice… freewill as it’s sometimes called. We have the choice to be happy with what we have, or to wage our bets, at the risk of losing all that we hold in our hands. Perhaps the winners in life are not those that risk it all to get what they want, but those that have a modest portion of life’s blessings and choose to be excessively happy and thankful for what they have. Perhaps it is all in our perspective.