You've Got to Choose It

I've been thinking a great deal about deliberateness this fall. Well, truth be told, I've had deliberateness on my mind for years. "I want to live deliberately," I would often write in my early-twenties journals when my life was a heightened war of who I was truly and who I thought I should be.  

At 33, that younger war is less painful, but I still want what I wanted then: to be conscious in my daily life; I do not want my actions to be mere or numbed. I want to choose what is best for my own fervent, tender self. I want to live deliberately.  

Don't we all? And yet, and yet.  

And yet we are so often caught on the riptide of our lives, moving forward because we must move somewhere, and even if we live longing for the past, we are still stuck in a crescendo of time - for each day is one removed from that remembered golden time.  

What do we seek, either back or forward? Back when or what if? What would a deliberate life even resemble? 

Our most deliberate moments are often those when no other time did indeed exist (as no other time, ever, does): The sunrise you chose to watch full through, the wedding where you danced in bare feet, the bird on the wire that you knew was God so you stopped to hear him sing, the midnight hours when you could have wept but instead you pulled your tired body up and went to visit the purring cat - you were deliberate in these moments though you did not perhaps know it. You were choosing to stop the tide around you, for just this time. 

So this, then, is the deliberate life. It is simply the life you choose. But you do have to choose, and this of course takes some thinking, some looking around you, some deep courage and muscle, some heartbreaking mistakes, some triumphs too, some deliberation. 

Thanks for reading,  

Beth