My good friend, Kelli, sent me this quote yesterday from Judith Warner's book, Perfect Madness.
If you have been brought up, all your life, being told you have wonderful choices, you tend, when things go wrong, to assume you made the wrong choices — not to see that the “choices” given you were wrong in the first place.
Wow. Does that hit anyone else right in the gut? I think that’s fantastic. So often in life I come across people who beat themselves up over chosing “Option A” - assuming all along that if they’d chosen “Option B” the outcome would have been different. Maybe so, but then again, maybe not. And that’s the point, isn’t it? You make the best decision you can at the time you have to make it with the information you have. And, bottom line, as Judith points out in her quote, you don’t know that BOTH choices weren’t crap. Both choices could have landed you in the difficult places you are. So, now what?
I think we should spend more time getting good at walking through difficult circumstances instead of spending so much time trying to avoid difficult circumstances. In baseball, the best hitters are the ones who can hit the curve balls. And the very best hitters actually expect a curve ball. They stand at the plate hoping for a pitch down the middle but also expecting something difficult knowing they can hit it.
Ooh, I feel a spring training coming on!
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