Words and Pictures :: Careful

The writing prompt from Meet Me At Mike's for this week is "careful."

When I was younger I thought that the only consideration for the kind of life you were going to have was the choices you made from day to day. My dad and I used to say that life is what you make it and my mother would immediately counter with – no, life is what gets handed to you. A kind of circular wrangling that went on and on and was never settled.

Those words have stuck with me since childhood and I still wonder who was right, though as I've aged, one of the things I'm beginning to think is that this isn't the only way to look at it.

Maybe life is more like a long, long hallway full of doors.

When we are young we charge right in, throwing doors open without much thought or hesitation. We are curious, interested, intrigued. Drunk on our own power of choice, we don't really pay attention to where the doors are leading us and we follow until we get tired, bored or at a dead end before trying another and then another. More. Faster. Better. Different.

When we are idealistic visionaries there is no landscape of mistakes behind us. The cloth of our lives is just beginning to be woven. We have no hindsight, nothing to look back on and discern the patterns that we are prone to repeating. 

We hear words like choose carefully, be alert, your future is in your hands and we think that they must apply to someone else. Can't you see I'm being careful? And then one day we look back on all those doors we've opened and the hundreds that were behind those - at all the ones that slammed shut and locked and then we realize how few there are to still open and it dawns on us that we've hit middle age. 

It's a shock at first. And then something interesting happens. If we're lucky, we realize that the doubt that replaced the sense of excitement that surrounds choice is a blessing in disguise. As we age, we begin to slow down and think – Should I? What if? How? 

We relax a bit, hesitate just a second before opening yet another door – "Remember how that worked out last time?? Perhaps we don't really want to go through that again. . ."

And, just maybe, that's the difference between life is what you make it and life is what gets handed to you – the potency of memory. And the true power of careful choice.