The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any. –Alice Walker
If you’re a career woman like me or had a career and left to spend time in other ways, you know that life is all about choices. Each choice has one or more consequences. Sometimes our individual choices make great sense at the time, but once stacked on-top of others, even a great choice can often leave us exhausted, frustrated, and wondering: How the heck did I get to this point? Is this what I was expecting my life to be? Can I really keep this going? Am I even happy?
If my to-do list is short on the days such questions creep into my consciousness, I might have enough time to wander into deeper territory: Was I put on this planet, in this body, to work at this job? to select this life partner? to have these children? to live in this city or town, in this country? Is there more to this life that I’m missing?
Often our choices are triggered by cultural and societal expectations that bombard us; we tend to adopt them as personal expectations. We have choices to make but who is really deciding which choice is the right choice?
It’s no surprise that many of us have come to question our choices. Many of the women I know struggle with these internal conversations. How do we weed through all the expectations and choices, evaluate each one, find what’s missing, choose what makes sense, and then weave each thread into some type of lovely harmonic pattern?
Many of us are so busy maintaining the status quo, untangling tangled threads, smoothing, fixing, running, working that we do not even notice that we are unhappy. Or if not unhappy….perhaps not living the life we always dreamed of.
We are going to explore the choices that we are faced with, take an inventory of where we are today and where we want to be tomorrow. Whether tomorrow is Thursday, next month or in ten years when the kids are married.
In the meantime, if you are tired, it isn’t surprising. Scientific American recently wrote an article called Tough Choices: How Making Decisions Tires Your Brain.
