The Road to Redemption: Are you making the right choices?

The Road to Redemption


There is a long winding path that has many twists and turns; obstacles to overcome and options to take. As the soul makes it's journey there is a fight for control; love or hate, good or bad, moral or immoral. As I travel this road, I have encounter many that refuse to accept in their heart, mind and soul that they have consequences for their decisions; it is always someones fault besides their own.

Imagine you are walking down this path and you come to a fork in the road...it has 9 choices that lead in different directions...some have hills to climb, some have water to swim in, some are dark and some are light...what makes you choose the path to take? You do. You decide which direction to go. Nobody else has the ability to force you, do they?

Once you decide, you have options to take on each and every path, sometimes there is a big rock in the path...do you climb the rock and risk falling and injuring yourself or do you walk around it carefully? The lake you try to swim is infested with poisonous snakes...do you show fear and let them bite you...or do you decide to swim confidently knowing they can only hurt you if you let them? Do you walk carefully 20 miles around the lake? Guess what...there will be snakes on that path as well.

You can even try to turn back and make another choice, but undoing what you already did is not possible...did you try to learn from your choices or did you think...oops do over? There are no do over's. Once you have chosen the path you will have consequences to deal with and going back where you came from has it's consequences. The law of physics suggest for every action there is a reaction. The law of karma has the same characteristics.

I try to make choices that are not selfish and greedy, but even those types of decisions have consequences; good intentions do not always have the desired results. Expectations that we have for others are often met with failure. Having expectations is in the control of the individual and this creates a problem. Not only for the person with them, but the person you have them for and the relationship with that person; this applies to situations and destinations, too.

When you have that feeling of being let down by someone ask yourself, Why? Is it fair to that person you had an expectation about their reaction? Their behavior? Their decision? Their rejection? Who had the expectation in the first place? You did. There is such a thing as a reasonable expectation, but even that has it's downfalls. We make reservations and appointments that are often not kept or honored for one reason or another; does that mean you have the right to feel picked on or angry or hurt? Yes, you do have that right, but the only one that can control that is the person with the expectation.

Don't confuse optimism and realism and being positive or being negative with a lack of expectations; they are all independent of each other. You can be optimistic, realistic, positive or negative without expectations; they are each enhanced, however, by the level of expectations of which each individual has control over.

You ask what does this have to do with the road to redemption? I will tell you. Even when we think we are making the right choices the destination is not always what we expect it to be; the road to redemption is not paved with expectations.

Soul

Nine forks in the road? Each varying with rocks, rivers, snakes, cliffs, hills, and obstacles.

Moral or immoral? Good or evil? The soul fighting for control?

Sounds like a human conceived maze, that has no redeeming qualities period.

Why not take what makes life complicated and remove it from your existence, if you view life as that sort of path. Simplify the complex, appreciate the simplicity, make cliffs into beaches, rivers into streams, snakes into flowers, hills into sunshine, rocks into orchards, etc, etc. The difficult choices that seem like walking through shark infested waters, and climbing mountains are the one's that most define us, but they don't have to perceived that way. Perception affects how we solve problems we must face, if you want to perceive the different paths in a difficult way, you will certainly have more difficultly.

People are going to be hurt by the decisions people make. If you make a choice, there will be consequences. Why pollute the road with so many choices, be decisive actions yet open with your thoughts.

It's a trick question. In large part, people make the choices they have available to them, many times those choices prove to be wrong but in many cases when you're living through the circumstances, it can sometimes be impossible to see.