Don’t feel sorry for yourself if you have
chosen the wrong road–turn around!
Edgar Cayce
There’s a saying that you’ve made your bed, now lie in it… or that you’ve dug your own grave. I think the original intent of the taunt was that you can’t expect to act selfishly without consequence. Yet, for some reason we tend to misapply it to intolerable situations in life because the change needed to fix a problem freaks the cr@p out of us.
“Well,” you say to yourself, “I decided to go down this path so now I’ll have to make the best of it.” Then we pour time and energy into being unhappy while refusing to do anything about it.
My favourite thing to do was pretend I had no choice. I couldn’t change my path because it was somehow against the rules or someone would be upset with me. I suppose you can’t imagine that, since I tend to be very forthcoming and dismissive of the social code these days. “The code is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules,” is how I’d put it (thanks to Capt Barbossa). It was very convenient, though, to say I didn’t have a choice. It absolved me from ever have to do anything hard. I absolved me of my own unhappiness.
The truth is, you’re never stuck. You’re never without a choice. Sure, people don’t like it when you change the playing field on them but eventually the world equalises again.
So, if you find yourself on the wrong road, turn around. It’s never too late.