| Choices.
We make tons of them every day. Sometimes you don’t
even know when you’re making one that just changed
your life. Bureaucrats make them; elected officials make
them; we all make choices. The funny part is they sneak
up on you. Yea, that’s right....sneak. Here you are,
cruising along in your favorite off highway rig when you
come to an unfamiliar fork in the road. Now that’s
a simple choice. Right or left? You weren't consciously
thinking about making a choice. Either way you choose
determines your destiny in some small fashion. And quite
possibly affects the lives of someone else.
After
leaving the great "five-oh", yes 50, sometime
back, I can tell you that there's one rule of life that
I can hang my tire gauge on: CHOOSE and ALLOW. We choose
our paths; and we allow things to happen to us that
do seem to happen. Now obviously you can find some things
that have happened to you that you didn't specifically
"allow." But I say, yea, you probably did
because of who you are, where you were, what you were
doing, and how you were doing it.
Choices
determine who we are.....and where we end up! I am reminded
of a District Ranger who chose to administratively close
a Forest road for one year. I knew, and he knew, that
he was hoping that this choice of his would go unnoticed
for better than a year; and that the road would just
stay closed (without NEPA or any public involvement).
Well, this choice, along with some other bad choices
he made in life, eventually cost him his job. There
were a bunch of us who would not ALLOW this to happen
(certainly not unnoticed).
Then
there's the all to common story of the recreationists
trying to get back to camp before dark and they take
an unfamiliar short cut! Hey! It looked good on the
map! Well, inevitably, the road gets worse before it
gets better; it gets real dark; and everyone is not
only hungry and tired, but VERY frustrated with the
person who made THIS choice! I used to tell my groups
that I was going by "dead reckoning," a navigation-by-instinct
tool I learned in the military. My group has suffered
through enough of my choices that they now tell me they
agree with my dead reckoning.........they "reckon"
if I don’t get them back to camp by dinner, that
I'll be "dead!"
In
a previous column I gave another example of a choice
when facing a Wilderness sign that makes no sense at
all.....the choice to ignore or adhere. Again, I say
to you, adhere. Do not allow your emotion to override
your common sense. The law (Wilderness sign) is one
of those things we need to set the example on. We cannot
ALLOW our opponents the opportunity to point the ugly
finger at us.
Every
letter we write, every email we send, every time we
speak about something we believe in, we're making a
choice. Hopefully we're changing something. When you
make a choice, you are taking charge of your circumstances
to some extent. One of the tricks here, is to make choices
that don’t cause you to look back with regrets.
Regrets will drain you. They are a waste of energy.
You did what you did at the time because you thought
it was the right thing to do then. :)
So
now you have to learn to look ahead far enough to make
sure your choice will not cause regrets. I don’t
believe in regrets. I give it my best shot to make a
choice by looking ahead as far as I can, and then, live
with the outcomes. Then again, I won't ALLOW something
to drag me down, so I make new choices. Boy, what a
circle, huh?
Choices.
We make them everyday. Do I write a letter to my congressperson
or not? Do I express my opinion today or not? Do I go
to the polls and vote knowledgeably? Do I join an organized
group representing what I believe in? Do I CHOOSE to
get involved in my life choices; or do I ALLOW someone
else to do it for me? The choice is yours.......
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