A Big Clue Whether I’m Doing the Right Thing
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Every day, from when I wake up to when I go to bed, my life is a series of choices. And each choice for me is important. What to wear, what to eat, when to eat, how much to eat, what I should say to someone, what to do in a work situation, how to spend my free time.
I make choices all day long, and I never want to make the wrong choice or make a poor choice or fail to make a choice. I want to make the right choice every time. Each choice is important because it affects me. It could affect my body condition, my relationships, or my future. Likewise, if I do things in the wrong order or not in the best order, then it affects my life.
With so many choices all day every day, it’s difficult or actually impossible to make the right choice and do the right thing every time. And although I can never really know whether I’m doing the right thing until I do it, there are clues that I need to recognize to see that it’s the right thing. Recognizing the clues and what is a clue is the key for me.
Doing the right thing sometimes, of course, means not doing what I want to do and doing something I don’t particularly want to do because it’s the right thing to do. I can’t be selfish in my choices, but that doesn’t mean the result can’t still be good for me or that I can’t sometimes do the thing I want to do; it’s just that it needs to truly be the best thing to do.
And that means that I need to be sensitive to which way things are going. People’s reactions, especially people close to me, are a big clue as to whether I’m doing the right thing or not. It sometimes happens that someone says that I should do something, and when they say it, it’s like a straight punch that hits me. The truth of it really rings a bell, and I know that it’s the right thing.
But just as important as choosing the right thing to do is recognizing when I should stop doing something. If people have an abnormally strong reaction, much stronger than the situation warrants, then my alarm bells go off, and I know it’s a clue to stop doing what I’m doing.
Or if something seemingly simple becomes impossible to do, then I know it’s a clue to give up. I sometimes feel as if I’m being blocked, and this can be mentally too. I get uncharacteristically confused, and in the end, have to give up what I’m doing. This is a clue to stop.
These clues are everywhere, and at first, I didn’t recognize them as clues, or I couldn’t interpret their meaning. And that was okay because I was learning. But as I got better at picking up the clues, I could look back and see where I had gone wrong, and this helped me to get it right the next time.
And there is always a next time. My life isn’t that different every day, and situations repeat themselves all the time. So I can always find the same clues again and then make the right choices. Each choice is very important to me because it changes my life.
