Choices

\We are constantly choosing among several paths to tomorrow, usually unknowing, but not uncaring, of the end.

Often we are guided by nothing more than a gentle breeze blowing across our hearts, seemingly constant in its ever-changing ways and directions.

Our choice today may not be ours tomorrow, but once made, must be followed to know. Each of us must be willing to accept responsibility for our own choices; we really need share little of the responsibility of the other\'s choice, that being the duty of a parent to the young.

Since no one can know, at least with certainty, the end of the path chosen, the choice often does not require an objective analysis. It surely must be better to be guided by the direction of those gentle breezes across our hearts, for it is always feelings which must dictate that which is unknown, that which is not capable of quantification.

Have we made the right choices? As long as our choices are not static, they can never be wrong. What we decide to day we must again decide tomorrow, this time with a touch of objectivity from yesterday\'s experiences.\

I wrote the above in late 1986 while contemplating divorce and was, at the time, filled with trepidation about the future. I wasn\'t sure what the future held and I needed an answer. Was I making the right decision if I chose to file for divorce? The conclusion was simple; there was no way of knowing. There was nothing to base it on except emotion-following only my heart in the beginning. That hardly seemed like the right way to make a decision. I was used to making decisions based on objective analysis, but decisions of the heart, I concluded, are never made that way. How can they be?

I\'ve carried these words with me for 15 years on now coffee-stained paper. I\'ve thought about them not only in the wake of the attack on America September 11th as I\'ve tried to sort through my feelings of that day, but many other times in the past.

We constantly make what begin as decisions of the heart daily. I\'m doing that now with a woman I love deeply. The first day we were together, it nothing but emotion that brought us together for that first meeting. There was no history between us I could draw upon. I made the decision to do so based upon my heart, and continue to make the decision daily. Oh, my heart is still involved to be sure, but now I can look back on a relationship that grown and blossomed over a long period of time with a sense of objectivity. Is love objective? No! It remains an emotional response and I know because of the love I feel I would commit irrational acts to save it or her. But, there is a certain amount of objectivity for the decision I now make daily, and it is a daily decision to stay together. With each passing day I can look back, and make not only what remains an emotional decision, but one tempered with experience of the joy, the happiness, the love, and most important, the friendship we have, by looking at yesterday, the day before that, and before that-all the way back to that first day we got together when it based only upon a whim.

Is there a moral to all of this? For me, yes, and I hope for many others also. Our choices are never wrong because we make them over and over again with each passing day. Therefore, a person need not fear the unknown. If your heart leads you in one direction, follow the path it chooses. You\'ll know tomorrow or the next day if you have chosen wisely.