Opportunities Are Usually Once in a Lifetime ~ But Not the Way You Think

Today’s prompt from NaBloPoMo in our continuing discussion of RISK:

Talk about an opportunity you let pass you by.

I have walked around with this prompt for the last sixteen hours.

I wouldn’t call it a burning sort of “walking around” but I would say I have looked at it from several different vantage points.

I realized as I poured myself my second cup of coffee I let opportunities pass me several times every day. I make a choice, I let go of another opportunity. I say yes or no, I watch a different possibility do a u-turn and go looking for someone else.

We tend to only think of the biggies: the job we didn’t take or the man who married someone else or the abortion we had or the time we weren’t able to go on that Alaskan cruise after all.

How would my life have turned out if I took that job instead of this one? What if I had moved to Chicago?

“What if” questions are a blessing if you ask with wonder-filled curiosity. They are not so great if you choose to look at them with any shading of lament. I consistently tell my friends, “You can’t change that choice you made fifteen years ago, but you can change how you relate to it right now.”

Today I let the opportunity of sitting at my desk for a full four hour writing session and instead, met my friend for our mastermind group. Along the way, I saw a photo op. I could have chosen to continue straight to Dagny’s, my coffee shop destination. Instead, I chose to step into that perfect lighting that comes early every morning.

I discovered a new angle. I stumbled across a historical marker.

I got back in my car, headed to coffee, sat outside because it was what my friend wanted even though I was cold.

I drank my coffee and I wrote, I wrote, drank my coffee and my friend arrived. I had chosen to see any timing as perfect. We haven’t sat and talked in a while, so it was like eating a hot fudge sundae in the midst of a strict diet and the calories actually DON’T count by some miracle. I could have taken the opportunity to get angry and pissy about her being late. It feels so much better to take the opportunity to strengthen our friendship, instead.

I drove to my house and noticed the new gardener had arrived. I really didn’t want to deal with him so instead of going home to get into my daily writing, I headed to the bluffs near my house and sat for a session with Natalie. You know, Natalie Goldberg? She wrote Writing Down the Bones and this week I’ve been reading her brand new book The True Secret of Writing.

She wrote, among other things, “It’s good to do ridiculous things.”

I remembered why I loved her.

I sketched a house below me.

I chose to leave in time to get home for my writing group, even though I figured the gardener would still be there. I had taken the opportunity to spend more time with my book. I’m so glad I did that instead of taking the opportunity to be super muttering grouchy whiner. I didn’t even complain when I saw the young man hacking away at my rogue lavender plant.

Do you see where I am going?

What if we revel in our choices instead of losing energy through lamenting yesterday’s choices and opportunities not taken.

Each choice is a mini Robert Frost moment:

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

You are the one who chooses which opportunity to take and which to let go.

If you are a Frost fan, you know I left off the final stanza.

I figure you don’t need either he or I to tell you which opportunity to take. Its better if you reach and discover your path with your heart rather than doing what two poets in a blogpost would do.

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