Your Path
We all have an ideal. That person we want to be. The person we are, somewhere deep inside. The ideal we want to live up to. It could be a person we know and love. It might be a fictional character from television, a movie, or a dream. It might just be a belief in the goodness in all of us. Our ideal is the person we think of when we’re trying to make a tough decision, and we say What would Lucas do in this situation?
But, sometimes we get led away from that person. We forget to double check our decisions. We lose sight of the person we once were and the life we once wanted. We may be led by the actions of another. A sudden event in our life may push us. We might begin a steep fall down a slippery slope of bad decisions without even knowing it. Before you know it, you’ve moved so far away from your ideal that the person you were before becomes your new dream. At least she hadn’t made so many bad decisions. Or did she?
All we ever wanted was to fill our dream, our ideal. But, now it seems so bleak. It’s drifting away, into a deep dark grayscale abyss. We’ve dug a hole so deep that it seems impossible to reach back up to the place where we once were. Let alone rise above it.
How does this happen? How do we become someone we know we’re not? It scares me just thinking about it. Living to see it realized is unspeakably difficult. A better question to ask might be, What can we do? We all know that choosing the right path is never easy. It’s an accumulation of every decision you’ve ever made, and every decision you didn’t make. The future holds infinite possibilities for us, but probability says that at least as many of those paths are fulfilling, as they are disappointing. It might be the saddest despair for a man to look back on what once was, or what could never be. I can’t tell you what the right path, or the path to fulfillment might be, but I can tell you it doesn’t lead to despair.
