Choosing The Path Of Least Resistance

3 February 2011

The Year of the metal Rabbit just begun.  Feng Shui experts tell me it will be my year.  I have heard that before.  I guess whatever they think is Your Year may be completely different to what you think of as My Year.  Frankly, I have always believed that I make my own destiny.

But then, most times, I am stuck in a situation I can not comprehend and grapple with and I ask myself, did I will this to happen to me?  Or do things just naturally happen, for a reason.  Even Marilyn Monroe said that.  It is probably true.  Didn't JFK choose to keep her?  Didn't she also choose to dye her hair blonde, so she can have more fun?  Wasn't it said that she chose to take her own life?  Well I don't know about the last one.  But what do I really know?  

Do you ever tell  yourself when you get out of bed,  today I will make all the right choices?

What do we really know for sure when for every bend in life there is always a path that looks hard and a path that looks longer?  I never really saw a path that looks easy or short.

When I was a little girl and my Dad and I would go for a walk to the village park, he used to ask me why I liked to step on stones that were misshapen or rugged.  I would laugh and think that it was just a game, I did not know exactly what he meant.  

Until one early evening, when my Dad and I got caught in the rain.  And I decided instead of cowering and sharing the umbrella with him, to just play in the rain.  I saw him laughing and smiling as I played with the water on my feet, splattering all over my shin, getting my clothes wet.  I pretended to walk slowly back to him using the elevated patches of ground, pretending I did not want my feet wet when I was practically soaked.  

Then he said it again, "Why do you choose the toughest rocks, hunny?  There are huge ones that are safer and you would not keep on slipping?"

I looked at him with the rain dripping from my hair giggling, not knowing exactly what he meant as I was pretty much enjoying myself.  

And  he smiled with his eyes when he looked at me and said, "It does not always have to be a tough road, doll.  You can always choose the shorter and  easier way."  

I must have frowned at him, mainly for lack of understanding, but his face changed and finally said, "But that would not have been that much fun wouldn't it?  And that wouldn't have been you, my little princess."

He lifted me up and bear hugged me.

I still hear him telling me that to this day.  I am after all my father's daughter.  But now I totally understand what he meant on that rainy late afternoon.  And however I splice and cut it, I still make a lot of hard-line choices.  Choices I have made in my life, I know most people would probably prefer to escape the choices I made than decide on them.  But I did.  I still do.

I never really see an easier and shorter path.  So I still choose to take the harder, and often longer path to wherever I want to go.  Tough.  But like he said, it was where I get the most kick out of.