The Wise Life

The Power of Choice

The tiny ovels of huckleberry leaves were bright and maroon red. Short and wiry they covered the northern inside curves of a seven thousand foot plus elevation hill. The bite in the air warned of snow. The huckleberries had since come and gone. Each autumn this hill was one of my secret favorites just about a mile from the two then three-room log cabin I grew up in. Which on any one day would be home for four to twelve people.?

This hill was enough distance from the cabin, bunkhouse for the boys and one older brother's two room cabin to get some air, one thick hill of dirt to buffer my overwhelmed sense of the things.

The hill was always there with a steep and silent shoulder to cry on. Teaching me how to listen to more than my own heart beating. If I sat quiet long enough tucked into the curve of bushes; life around me would resume it's sounds and movements, this particular hill was a grotto of stillness compared to the others around and for that reason I came. On that hill I came for silence and clarity.

There used to be a stillness and a kind of presence on the mountain. It sustained me.

Like water to parched cells.

There were no boundaries to my childhood, I was taught love in words, I was taught love in food I ate, the fact I had a roof over my head.

The love of my childhood was not soft.

Because it wasn't: I survived, not only that way of life but the colder things of my childhood that included close relatives taking my innocence, my sense of safety, denigrating any sense of self that wasn't molded in bold toughness of character on all fronts, weakness and what they considered weak was not allowed or rather one became a target or laughing stalk for expressing what was considered weak.

The power of peer pressure should never be overlooked and neither should the deep personal power to "choose" that we are all endowed with from our first breath.

When we have been deeply harmed too often we take it on as our whole identity or part of our identity. Our journey is not our identity rather it is part of what has shaped us. Whether it be personal life or professional: owning and leveraging our personal human factor's is the key to exponential success in life on all levels.

Remember and never forget you have ultimate choice in how you place meaning. You have ultimate CHOICE in what you make of your life. What do you want to your life to look like 5 years from now? Write it down. What do you need to do to get there? Write it down. Now Implement.

With love and Purpose, Andrea