Daily Decisions and the Future

We make thousands of little choices every single day. 35,000 of them statistically. Many of these, we don’t think twice about. For example, you may wake up tomorrow morning and decide to sleep an extra three minutes instead of waking up with your alarm clock. This seems super insignificant at the time, and probably will never seem too important. Because of this, you will do everything that morning three minutes late. Shower, get dressed, start your car, head to work. You might be three minutes late to work, which doesn’t seem like a big deal. But, what if there is a reason behind your unwillingness to get out of bed on time this morning? An internal compass of fate, perhaps? Say three minutes before you drove to work, a truck sped through a red light, without any focus on the road or other cars. If you had left to work on time like you do everyday, you would have been t-boned by this truck. The consequences would have been much worse than the sigh you received from your boss for being a little late. We don’t typically notice these types of choices. But, our minds love to focus on negative outcomes of decisions. An example of this, would be the domino effect giving you a bad day. First, you didn’t get gas on the way to work. Because of this, you got it on the way to pick up the kids from school. Now, you’re twenty minutes late picking them up. Since you were late picking them up, you didn’t have time to go by the house before dropping them off at their dance lessons. Well, today they forgot their dance shoes and you weren’t able to grab them. Your daughter had to borrow shoes from the teacher, and it gave her a blister on her toe. After lessons, you take them to the pharmacy to buy bandages for her toe. At the pharmacy, you run into a friend from high school who wants to chat, you don’t have time so you brush them off. Of course anxiety will make you feel bad for this. You grab fast food on the way home because now you won’t have time to make dinner. Your younger kid spills their chocolate milk all over the floor of your van and it will smell bad for weeks. Once you get home and the kids to bed, you are exhausted. So, feeling extra tired, you hit snooze in the morning. You sleep three extra minutes. You see, little choices add up. The bad things in life could easily be fate trying to guide you towards something good. Since you didn’t get gas before work, you didn’t get in a serious wreck the next day. Maybe you didn’t get gas just because you didn’t want to stop listening to a song you like. Next time you are stuck focusing on your bad days, think about how they might be leading you to something good.