Choosing the Right Path

Your life never goes as expected.  There are always twists and turns, some good and some bad, that send you in new directions.  I think back to when I almost joined the Navy.  What would my life had been like if I had not decided, just hours before making the trip to sign the papers, that it was the wrong decision?  What if I hadn't decided to leave my job at Cocos, a job that I hated, and head down the street to Bob's Big Boy where I was hired on the spot as a cook?  I would meet the love of my life, Angie, who started there a few months later.  What if my parents hadn’t decided to move us 6,000 miles from London to San Francisco, or if they had decided 5 years earlier to take the job offer in Australia.  

Every day we make decisions that affect how we travel forward in life.  Some decisions are life changing and some we don’t even realize we are making.  It is like reaching a fork in the road and deciding which path to take, but there are millions of forks and we usually don’t notice most of them.  For me, there was one decision I made over and over from the time I was four years old.  There was a path that I could have taken, that I secretly wanted to take but was scary beyond imagination.  The path was always there, forever tempting me, but one that I would have to take alone.  Every day, since I was four, I decided to not tell anyone my biggest secret, to keep pretending, to keep everyone else happy.  I decided to ignore the path.

I was resigned to the fact that my life, a great life to anyone looking in from the outside, was my fate.  And why wouldn’t it be a great life?  I had a wonderful wife and two sons, who I love dearly, a good career, a nice house and a loving extended family.  But the other path kept getting harder to ignore.  More importantly, the path I kept taking was becoming more and more scary.  Was I going to reach the end of my journey full of regret?  Was I even going to make it much further down the path without giving up?  The journey was becoming increasingly draining and I wasn’t sure how much further I could travel.  The forbidden path, that once seemed impossible to take, was now looking like my only salvation. To avoid it any longer would mean almost certain disaster.

This is my unexpected journey, my journey down the once forbidden path.  The path that I have avoided most of my life and one that I never expected I would have the guts to take.  I don’t know where this path will take me, but for the first time I am heading in the right direction.