Crossroads
Every day has a million crossroads.
Your alarm goes off and you decide to get out of bed that moment rather than hit the snooze just one more time. You make a dozen more decisions before you brush your teeth. After you brush your teeth you ponder whether to buy a coffee on your way to work or to brew coffee at home. Buying coffee is easier but requires leaving at least ten minutes earlier and obviously, spending money. You decide to make your own. From there: enough for 1 cup or 2? milk or half and half? Should you put it in the to-go cup in case you don’t finish or drink from your favorite, hand painted ceramic mug?
You decide to wear the black shoes over the blue shoes, wear your hair up instead of down, and take a sandwich for lunch over a microwave meal.
On the way to work you take the back roads and avoid the highway, you listen to country, not rock, and you choose to wait until a stop light to answer your ringing phone. You make a hundred decisions on your route to work alone.
At work you have an important decision to make: you can be nice to the coworker who doesn’t like you, or you can treat her the same way she treats you. By noon your tongue is sore from biting it so much.
More decisions.
Smile at everyone who walks in or check Craigslist just one more time? Pass these customers on to a coworker or wait another half an hour to eat lunch? When you finally get a lunch break at 3:30 you choose to wait until you’re off to eat at home rather than spend money you don’t have on a lunch you will have to practically inhale anyway. Thirty minutes is hardly enough time to drive somewhere, buy food, enjoy your lunch, and get back to work on time. It is however enough time to find the fastest fast food within a one mile radius, devour it within a couple minutes, and get back to work to clock in three minutes late… with a stomach ache. So instead of going through that hassle, you get a Pepsi from the vending machine, maybe a bag of chips, and you spend 11 minutes winding down from the stress of work, 16 minutes relaxing, and 3 minutes staring at the time clock and preparing to go back to work.
By the time you clock out for the day and are walking to your car you are exhausted. More choices. Buy cat food tonight, or make a trip out in the morning on your day off? Take the highway or the back roads home? Windows down or AC on?
And then your phone buzzes inside your pocket. The text is simple and harmless enough. “Hope you had a nice day.” Suddenly every small decision you made today seems just that – small. Your heart pounds and you feel flushed. The next choice is much bigger than “Reply” or “Ignore.” The choice is to feel. Or not to. Open yourself – and your heart – to the idea of someone new or build another wall? Take a leap or stay dry on the shore?
So you are standing at a crossroads and you have no idea which path to follow. It seems so simple, the answer so obvious. Respond and see where it goes. But one choice to “see where it goes” can have so many implications. Open one door, close five others. If you take this road, will you have to backtrack to find the path you were on again? And will you lose sight of the roads you didn’t take completely?
It is simple, and the answer really is obvious. Make the choice to see where it goes, or don’t. But don’t paralyze yourself. Because if you don’t open this door, will you ever open another?
