‘Choose wisely: Our lives are defined by the choices we make’

I could not even hazard a guess how many choices we make in a lifetime. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions. Good choices, bad choices, how do we decide at the time if we are making the right choices? Recently someone said to me, “Well you made the choice”. She was brow beating me a little and I let her. I awoke in the middle of the night thinking about the choice she was talking about. I had left home before I turned 17, my choice, but one I don’t think my mother ever forgave me for. My friend thinks perhaps I could have waited till I was a little older and my mother would have been happier with my decision. Perhaps she was right, but at the time, I did not think I had a choice. My father was the reason I left home and I have never told my mother, another choice I have regretted for years, but still could not bring myself to tell her.

When we make choices, many different things spur them on. The choice to do different subjects at school — probably because you like said subjects or find them easier. Your choice of friends. Did you choose them because you liked them or to be popular? Your chosen career. Did you actually ‘choose’ a career or did you just get a job? Was it a job you made into a career or was it one of many? Did you choose to ‘suck up’ to those in your employment that could help you up the ladder of that career, or did you think, ‘sod ‘em’. I wonder …

The person you choose to spend your life with. I made three choices there — none of them turned out to be the right choice, but I thought they were at the time. Perhaps you made a choice not to marry at all. Right or wrong, they are the choices you made.

Throughout life, you make many choices, good ones and bad ones. I’ve heard people say, “You made the choice. If you had chosen to work harder. You should have chosen better.” The one that gets to me is, “We made a choice to go without and work hard, so that we could live easier in retirement”. This is a bad choice of words. Most of us make choices based on our circumstances at the time. I didn’t choose to live in the outback, but I ended up there as a teenager. I didn’t choose to be beaten up almost every day of my early school years. They were choices others made that affected my life.

Some of us find the choices we make in life, for the most part, turn out okay, if not pretty good. Some of us know there were choices we made that we were not comfortable with and perhaps we were not wise. Some of us make choices that will lead to consequences nobody could foresee. By the time we are of an age that we know what hindsight is, it’s usually too late to change choices we have made along life’s path. If you see someone struggling, not making ends meet, not having a support system of family or friends or just the recipient of bad luck, it might not be wise to say, “It was their choice”.

Choices are not easy and you would have to have a sixth sense and the best luck in the world for your choices to always be right. You can never walk in someone else’s shoes, so you don’t know what led a person to make such a bad choice. You cannot assume anything about others choices, but you can try to understand. We will never be a society of perfect choices — it’s not in the nature of humans. We don’t have that gift, so just do the best you can, make the choices you think are right and don’t let people put you down or ridicule you because they have made that choice — the choice to believe they are entitled.

No matter what life is made up of choices. We need to make the best of the ones we make and hope we learn from the ones that weren’t so good along the way.

What are some of the difficult choices you’ve had to make? What choices are you confronted with as you head towards or are in retirement?

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