When making choices we tend to look for the painless route or at minimum the “least” painful route. Have you ever made a decision, experienced discomfort then go back to the drawing board looking for a painless option? Choice requires courage, discipline and patience in order for your desired results to manifest. Seeing your dreams realized brings personal satisfaction, achievement and awareness of your personal power. But choices do not lack pain and/or loss. They are indeed ambiguous and we're rarely 100% sure of how everything will turn out.
I can usually find a minimum of two options when making a choice. And both bring me pleasure and both bring pain. Here’s how my decision to go to the gym or sleep in on cold days looks on my pain vs. pleasure scale:
GOAL: Maintain a Lifestyle of Regular Exercise
Simple reasoning but it’s what I need to recall to memory when I’m feeling like slacking off. But it’s the same theory with anything. A teen experiencing peer pressure from the "cool kids" to use drugs, planning to move to a new city, state or country, starting a new career, cooking dinner, dealing with a difficult relationship etc. Anytime there’s a decision to make we have options that bring both pleasure and pain (relatively speaking course). With each choice there's an "unknown" that exist and there's nothing we can do about it. Our ultimate goal serves as our blueprint so that each decision builds our dream, one choice at a time. Couple things to keep in mind:
- Feelings are real and they tells us we are alive but if they become our motivation for decisions then we might find ourselves going back and forth trying to avoid pain but no closer to our goal.
- We are never 100% sure of how things will turn out but we can use the information we have, keep the goal in mind and make the best possible decision we can at the moment.
"...a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be." -W. H. Auden
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