Determination
“Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen.” – Horace Mann
When my oldest grandson was born he broke his collarbone. Of course we didn’t know it at the time, but a few days later he developed what looked like a pimple on his shoulder. I had Sarah take him to the doctor to see what was going on, because I knew that it wasn’t normal. The doctor didn’t know what was happening, and said, on a Friday, let’s just see what happens over the weekend.
On Monday, Sarah took him back as it was much worse, and since the doctor still didn’t know what was happening, she referred Sarah to a specialist. The specialist saw him on Tuesday, examined him and referred her to a doctor at Children’s Hospital as he felt something was wrong with his hip. The doctor at Children’s Hospital didn’t have a free appointment until the following week. On Thursday they called and said they had a cancellation and Sarah took him in. They took him straight into surgery. He had a staph infection from the broken collar bone and he spent almost two months at the hospital being treated. They told us he would have died over the weekend as the staph infection had traveled throughout his body.
So as you can imagine, the “let’s wait and see what happens” attitude is not a favorite thing for me. What it means is that you think you don’t know what to do, and so you abdicate your responsibility and allow for what happens to happen. This is also what procrastination is all about. Deep down inside you really do know what the correct decision is, there is just something about that decision that scares you.
Fear will spin it’s illusions to keep you from making a decision, because fear hates change. You may feel that if you make the decision that you know needs to be made, that someone won’t love you; that they will leave you; that you’ll be alone in the world. That they will blame you for their problems if you don’t rescue them, and yet you know deep down inside that you can’t really rescue them, and that you are just supporting their bad behavior.
The best thing that we can do for both ourselves and those we love, is to make sure that the right things happen. That we determine that we will make the “right” decisions and co-create the world that we live in, instead of just existing in the world made up of other peoples decisions. Be bold. Go into unexplored territory and find out who you really are. You’ll amaze yourself and we will all tell you, “we always knew just how amazing that you are and we alway knew you could do it!”
