Your choices are born of your unique struggles and joys, your unique deprivations and privileges, and your unique opportunities and challenges.
Some choices you make without thinking. Some choices are a result of the family you were born into, your peers, your community, and your culture. You value the choices you have made freely (based on your self-awareness, knowledge, experience, reflected-on advice, insight, wisdom, and maturity) more than those other types of choices.
Wrong choices contain hard lessons; and the most wrong choices contain the hardest lessons. Wrong choices have value for your life. They usually guide your future choices.
Your choices will become sacred to you if they are the right choices; any choices that appear unholy to you (immediately, on in looking back), are, or were, the wrong choices.
You will regret some of the wrong choices you make, when it's too late to do anything about them.
That's because some choices and losses are subtle, and will be caught in the net of your wisdom only when sufficient time has passed, your emotions have subsided, and you have developed the maturity to think wisely about those choices and losses. Maturity is hard-won, and a lifetime's work.
Likewise, you may also regret some of the wrong choices you make, only much later in life, when you are older.
That's because the net of our wisdom expands as we get older, and is one of the gifts of getting older.
You can have regrets about copying your peers, about making hasty decisions, about not being kinder, about taking unnecessary risks, about not paying enough attention to people or things that matter, about not being serious enough, about not being persistent enough, or character regrets such as not being truthful or honest, or not doing the right things.
Even if some of these regrets come only after the fact, or much later in life, they still have value.
The realization of your wrong choices enables you to grow as a person.
It also enables you to clear the air, make amends, and make things better, should you choose to do so. And you should choose to do so.
Choosing the right way or ways to deal with your wrong choices by making things better, will strengthen you physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.
Choosing the wrong way or ways to deal with your wrong choices, such as wallowing in regrets, guilt. self-pity, victimhood, or resentment, will weaken you physically emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.
You have to avoid what weakens you and move towards what strengthens you.
When you decide to let go of regrets, guilt. self-pity, victimhood, or resentment, and replace them with positive thoughts and positive action, it will start the brushstrokes of a brand new picture of your life.
Where there was only the dark sky of your negative thoughts, feelings and actions, it will unleash the light of one firefly and then another, and then another, until hopefully you can see the flickers of a thousand fireflies (Thank you David for your firefly themed painting).
This is also true about dealing with life's adversities and tragedies.
The right choices will strengthen you physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
The wrong choices will weaken you physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
Simple things chosen joyfully and ethically are better than golden things chosen in an unwise way.
Joy, bitterness, resentfulness, jealousy, are all a choice.
True or false: There's lots to think about when it comes to choices.
Suggested Next Reading: The River of Life
And a quote from Carl Jung: "I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
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