Learning to Change the Sheets

 For so many years I had held the belief that decisions I made would lead to an outcome that I would be then locked into.  A sense of permanence around choices in my life and the place that they would lead me.  This binary, locked-down thinking resulted in a lot of hesitation and indecisiveness throughout my life, as it put so much weight on every decision and choice I made.  

I remember speaking with a coach about this, as we tried to unravel the reason behind my five-year plan becoming a six- seven- or eight-year plan due to my inability to act.  She asked me to picture myself on a walk in the forest, faced with three different paths to choose.  Looking at each, it would be hard to know exactly where they were going to lead to, so I would need to just choose and start picking my way along one of them.  She asked me what I would do if I realized that the path I was on wasn't suited to my hiking abilities.  I told her that I would simply turn around and walk back to the start to choose a new path.  Hmmmmm.  

So why in that example could I so easily retrace my steps and change direction, and yet in my life I could not see a way to do that?  It has been a few years since that conversation and since then I have been working on undoing the deeply held belief about making your bed and then needing to lie in it.  Almost a punitive way of thinking about life decisions - even when you make a choice that isn't what you had thought or hoped it would be, you are stuck with the outcome.  Too bad, so sad.

I was speaking with a friend on the weekend about a realization that I have come to around my running and training that I have been doing (for years) and how it has been somewhat counterproductive to the outcomes and races that I have been been entering.  As I described what I had been doing I summed it up as all being a mistake.  His response "the only mistake would have been to not do anything" was the exact reminder that I needed.

What these conversations have helped me to see is that there does not need to be a locking-in when it comes to life choices and decisions.  I believe that deep-down we know when we are on the right path, and when we need to pause and evaluate what we are doing and the why behind it.  I don't think that bailing on a choice as soon as it feels uncomfortable or difficult is necessarily the solution, either.  Instead, I feel that we need to give ourselves time and space to feel things out, and to be aware and listen to our inner guidance.  If we come to a point in time where things just don't feel right, there is no harm in retracing our steps, changing the sheets on the bed we have been lying in, and taking a first step in a new direction.