Patience on the Journey...Goals Part III

“Patience is not the ability to wait but the ability to keep a good attitude while waiting.” ~ Joyce Meyer

In “Choose Your Own Adventure: Goals Part II”, I wrote about life’s journey being like a choose your own adventure book were the reader (journey taker) is exposed to information and then at the end of the chapter (checkpoint), the individual makes a decision about the new direction the adventure should take.

Today, I am thinking about how sometimes, the choices at the end of the chapter are not necessarily anything we would prefer but the only things available to us.  Or perhaps, they both seem good but once we make them, as the journey unfolds, things don’t turn out as well as we may have hoped with the choice we made.  A third option, is that there is one clear choice to make but once the journey unfolds, the other choice although less appealing back then would have been the wiser one in the long run.  So many possibilities.

The story may not be as pleasant as we thought it would be but we have no choice but to see it through to the next check point.  Some chapters may be longer than others and they journey may seem painfully slow in getting to the next checkpoint…the next place in which we can choose what to do next.   If we rush ahead, we may miss out on relevant details or make mistakes that could impact things in the other lives—the people in OUR lives.  The decisions we make impact those around us who move in the same journey space as us.

Life’s journey has many paces from checkpoint to checkpoint.  Some chapters are longer than others.  Some are not as exciting as others.  Some are full of difficult plot lines.  The long ones, the less exciting ones, the difficult plots lines—those are hard work.  Sometimes we choose wrong.  In a choose your own adventure book, the reader has the freedom to go back and make a “do over” but in life, we don’t have that option.  We have to see our decisions through to the next checkpoint.  There is no going back.

I think that one of the most difficult things in life is having the patience to get from checkpoint to checkpoint when we are not satisfied with where we are in the moment.  It takes a great deal of will power to not look back at what we miss from our past or what we might have in our future. It also takes a lot of work to find the good things when things seem so dark but it has to be done because if it is not, the passage of time to the next check point just seems that much longer and painful.