If you are like me, coming to make a decision about anything moderately significant can be borderline impossible. There is an innate fear that the choices we are making, the major life changing decisions we sort for ourselves, can be leading us astray and into a life of mediocrity and unhappiness – never to understand the full potential of the lives we could have and should have lived, had we chosen a different direction to follow.

I struggle with the idea of choice every day. I struggle with the sense that it’s up to me to choose the right path for myself to follow. How can anyone be expected to have enough understanding of themselves and the complexity of the world around them to make hopeful assumptions about what are and are not the correct choices to make for their futures? No one has been proven a certified psychic; so assuming the ability to foresee a future for oneself is off the table, how can anyone escape the pressure that comes with answering some of life’s toughest questions? How can we be expected to relieve the pressure of limited years, and even further limited opportunity to make the most of it?

I suppose fate can be a part of the equation for many. The fallback system in place for those with little confidence in taking steps towards the unknown, surrendering themselves to some nameless force of predetermined destiny. This idea of fate comforts the masses, myself included.

There is more, however.

Instead of falling sightlessly into the warm embrace of predetermination, in order to know you are on the right path, you have to place trust in yourself. You and you alone have gotten yourself to where you are today, regardless of where that may be. Each of us wakes up every morning and makes necessary decisions to continue on. As cliché as it sounds, sometimes I think that it’s not so much about the path in which we travel, but the traveling itself. The decisions we make are based upon the situations in which we are placed. It seems that it would make more sense to rather than try and better understand the paths we are taking, to understand the process that got us to those places. Understanding the process requires trust in yourself, to make sure that no matter the outcome, you will make it through and onto the next.

Maybe it was never the path less traveled that was to be favored; rather, the person who was able to understand that regardless they would find their way, eventually.

[Image via http://community.saa.co.uk/]