Just Sayin’ #6 by George Knight
‘Look Before You Leap’
Obviously we should all need to watch where we put our feet and look where we are going and this applies both literally and metaphorically.
The metaphor however becomes particularly apt when we are in a life- changing situation and/or about to make what could turn out to be a life-changing situation: situations which we will look back upon in subsequent years as ‘Defining Moments’ in our lives.
Now as it happens not all such ‘Defining Moments’ can be anticipated and in some way ‘pre-planned’. More often than not they simply appear sometimes shockingly as a threat, fortuitously as an opportunity or quietly as a wager that offers both risk and reward.
The truth of course is that we live our lives under conditions of great uncertainty and limited information. And most often it is under conditions of extreme uncertainty and inadequate information that we are required to take a decision which will significantly affect the rest of our own lives and seriously impact upon the lives of others.
Essentially we have here a serious situation where we need to look, we look, we don’t see much of anything and yet we have to decide to stay put or to push ahead, to jump or not jump.
Not all of Life’s ‘Defining Moments’ are ‘Hobson’s choices’ where one is ‘damned if one does or damned if one does not’, either stay or go, jump or not.
Sometimes one gets to choose between a number of great options and one is required to choose between what is good, what is better and what is great.
Sometimes also the choice is clearly something which is good for you and something which is not. Most times, of course we know none of this ahead of time, these are all only revealed in retrospect.
Pause for a moment and think about some of your major life decisions.
Think particularly of those bitter disappointments you felt when you failed to achieve what you struggled so hard for.
Think too about those successes you attained somewhat against the odds.
Now, years later, even decades later, with the benefit of hindsight reconsider your failures: were they actually failures or essential life lessons?
Similarly with your successes, did your successes prevent you from learning something you should have learned earlier in life?
In both cases consider too how both your putative failures and putative successes may both have helped you ‘dodge’ more than a ‘bullet or two’.
My point here, for what it is worth, is yes, that when we have to take life- changing decisions we must LOOK AROUND, as best we can, gather as much evidence as we believe we need, while paying particular attention to all the ‘Red Flags’ that signal clear or hidden dangers in our decision situation, but that is not enough.
Indeed when it comes to the most important decisions which we will and must make during the course of our lives, it is far from being enough: we must LOOK WITHIN, we must look within ourselves, this is the sine qua non for living a full and happy life, a life that is not haunted by regrets and bitterness but a heroic drama of which you are the co- author and in which you are the protagonist.
It does not matter what one’s age or life’s circumstances we all get to co-author our own movie which we then fully screen in our own heads and partially screen in the heads of others.
‘All the World is a stage and every man must play his part’ and so it seems a good idea that before we leap onto it we would do well to decide what part do we choose to play, Good Guy, Bad Guy or Useful Idiot.
As for me, every day I struggle to be a Good Guy. Maybe someday I will, as for the moment, I live in Hope. Just Sayin’.
Until next Thursday,
God bless,
George K
Restore God’s Kingdom
