Choices - The Deciders of Our Future

        There was a boy who, during his college days, chose to drop out of the college and join some creative classes. A very tough choice to make indeed if one wants to have a stable life. At a tender age of 21, he along with his guru Steve Wozniak started, what now is one of the world’s most admired companies, ‘Apple Computers’. And now I don’t need to name the person I am talking about for his work speaks more than he can do of himself. The point which I want to mention is that a choice taken by a single person out of the five billion people living in the world has made such a difference in the world that the world is still walking on the road chosen by him even after he is no more to show us the direction.

          Steve Jobs was himself a believer in the power of choices. He always tried to connect the dots. When at the age of 30, he was fired from the company he created; Jobs found himself unemployed but he chose it as a freedom rather than a curse. In fact, he later said that getting fired from Apple was the best thing to ever happen to him, because it allowed him to think more creatively and re-experience the joys of starting a company. And with such a radical thinking not just Steve Jobs but any person would go really ahead in his life.

          Most of us in our lives keep wasting our useful time in sticking to the past and crying over the spilt milk where in fact we could have gone ahead, taken right decisions at the right time and made our work fruitful. Life works in cycles. Once we do something, it has an effect on the next thing we do. The choices we make result into specific actions, the actions may be right or they may turn into a mistake, the mistakes we do become experiences, the experiences we meet with become attitudes, the attitude we develop makes our character and our character is what we choose to be.

         We shall always remember that what we are today is the result of what we did in the past and what we will be tomorrow will be the result of what we do today. Every moment of our present life is the result of choices made in the past.

         Thus, our choices govern our future and our choices are based on the experience we have had from our childhood till now. What all we have learnt, we have heard and accepted, we have thought and said affect our decisions. If the impact of our previous experience is a good one, then all well and good, but if it’s a bad one then it’s a matter of our choice. We can choose our decision to be a biased one or a radical one. It will be possible only if we understand one thing, that at any point in our life, whatsoever may be the situation, we are free to choose. No one can force us to do something, if we don’t want to do something. This may be taken into a positive way or a negative way, but it is an impregnable truth just like the existence of life.

         Chess is one of the games that very explicitly reflect this principle. Every move we play, becomes a deciding factor on how the game will end. Just like that in our life, every decision we choose decides our future, hence every choice should be taken after a good deal of thought. And even if you decide not to choose anything, you still make a choice.

         We can choose to quit, we can choose to be sad, to be angry, to live for vengeance, to accept failure, to get depressed, to stay down, to stop believing in Him, to deceive, to steal, to hate, to curse or we can choose to continue, to calm down, to forgive, to persevere, to be filled with zeal, to carry on, to thank Him, to believe, to give, to love, to benefact, to be satisfied along with a will to grow and most of all we can always choose to smile and be happy..