Choices

"EVERYTHING in life is a choice: Courage, happiness, religion, marriage, everything. The sooner you realize this, the happier your life will be." - Dennis Prager 

Choice is everything. What a profound statement, and one that takes some amount of bravery and self-reflection to embrace. In this self-centered world, it is so easy to blame everyone else for our problems and our strife. Of course, there are always things that are completely out of our control, but even in those situations it is up to us individually to decide and determine how we will accept the situation or not. Our attitudes and our actions. How we treat others and how we treat ourselves. How we serve our communities or engage in work...all of this and everything else is all about choice.

I think many of us, if we are completely honest with ourselves, want everything both ways. We want to make our own choices or feel as though we are, yet, we are often extremely obliging to allow and give over that choice to others or "them" to make the decisions for us. Taking complete ownership of our choices takes bravery and 100% accountability. The choices we make will sometimes be horrible or at least not the best when we look back on what we've done years later. Our choices may completely impact which paths are open to us as we move one foot in front of the other on our life's path. We choose to have a negative attitude rather than see the sliver lining and positive takeaways in our situations. 

Many years ago I found myself very unhappy in my marriage. My husband and I were very young when we married, and he had come from a very abusive family. Being so young and inexperienced, I had no idea that this or how this would impact our marriage and relationship. Very soon after we said "I do," he began threatening to leave me. At first these threats occurred about once a month,  and by the time we had three children all under the ages of seven-years-old, I found myself very unhappy in the marriage. While not physical, this manipulation and ongoing torture was abuse. For years, I kept telling myself that he's a good man, he's so nice to everyone, and he's a good father. The threats tore away at my own self-confidence and eroded my trust in him and in us. Honestly, I felt trapped and I felt that I was dying from the inside out.

I chose to stay with him because I did not want to break up our family. As hard as the choice was either way, this was the path I made and lived with for years; ten years, to be exact. On the day my then husband came home and threatened to leave us, his family, in front of my three young children, I couldn't take it any more. Something changed in me, and that change led to the immediate decision to leave him. We separated then divorced the following year. It was the toughest choice I've ever made, knowing it would affect everyone I loved and held dear and above all else...my children. But the alternate choice to stay was one I couldn't be accountable for any longer. 

Choice. Choices. Not always easy, usually quite difficult. But it is our choice to be.