Choosing your path when you get to pit stops

There’s this board game my children love to play. It’s called the Game of Life, and is a little similar to Monopoly, except you get to experience a wider variety of events. For instance, you could get married, have children, purchase property and retire.

At the beginning of the game, you receive a ‘car’, which after the rolling of dice, drive down your life path, stopping at occasional ‘choice pit-stops’. For instance, you get to choose whether to go to university or head straight into a career. Whichever choice you make has pros, cons and an associated financial value. At the end of life, you get to choose where to retire, and are finally able to “cash-in” your tokens.

There are so many similarities between life and the game of life. Certainly, in each life we will have opportunities to make several choices, and live with their consequences, both good and bad. However, there are so many other events that occur which we do not get to ‘choose’, such as a retrenchment or illness. One can only pray that when we find ourselves in those situations, we are given the fortitude to ‘nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune,’ as we are advised in the Desiderata.

However, driving that car, it becomes clear that life is like a road, and we generally get to choose our path, even when we don’t think that we doing so. Even the victim still gets to choose his response to the injustices he encounters. We are making choices every day, whether we are aware of it or not. In the intentional life, we become more aware of our ‘choice pit-stops’ and what those detours portend for us.

OPPORTUNITY COST

I recently came across an interview by an actor who made a choice to stop taking alcohol. He said, “I knew I would not live up to my potential if I continued partying and drinking.” He may not have realised it, but at some point on his journey, he chose to make his life an ‘alcohol free zone’. That choice would lead him down a different path.

Sometimes when we make a choice, we are happy about the positive outcomes it brings. However, most if not all choices have some challenging aspects. When we encounter those challenges, it is normal to start questioning our choices.

However, like a coin, all choices have two sides, there will be a heads and a tail. We find peace when we accept this. For instance, children are a blessing and they can bring us much happiness. However, the flip side, is that they can eat you out of house, they require visits to the doctor and you have to be present to raise them. The family portrait where everyone is dressed up, smiling and close is the heads of this coin. The other side shows up when the family bickers, the children are disobedient or taking the wrong path.

The other thing to consider as we forge our life path, is that like the actor mentioned above, each path means we have to give up something. For instance, when it rains and traffic becomes a mess, I usually make the decision to take a very long route home. This route adds about 40 more minutes to my commute. However, it is less busy and quite scenic. Whereas it would take me about 25 minutes home on a good day barring traffic, when I take the scenic route, I get there almost an hour later.

The end result may be the same, however, in so doing, for the exchange of more time on the road, I gave up stress and the unpredictability of traffic. Isn’t life like that? Sometimes it seems we are taking longer than others or that we are slow in one area. If we make a good choice, we may eventually catch up and find that something else was thrown in the mix to make up for our lost time.

Finally, when it comes to making life choices, we sometimes have clarity between a good choice and a bad one. The difficulty arises when we have to choose between two seemingly good choices. The only way to do this, is to go with the one which is not just good, but good for you.  In the end, the path you carve out for yourself is not one you stumbled upon, but one you crafted through daily choice.