Choosing What's Available

Do you feel like you rarely get what you want?  Like whenever you drop something, it’s always face down?  And that no matter what you do, the odds are stacked against you…especially when it comes to relationships?It may have nothing to do with your life and what cards you are being dealt, but more about the choices you are making in your life.  I have always loved the movie “Freaky Friday,” with Jamie Lee Curtis.  Not so much because of the movie itself, but because of the one-liner she throws out to her children each morning as they rush out the door.“Make good choices!”It’s a simple thing to say each day, but to actually live into the words will take some work.  Have you ever stopped to think about the choices you have made during the day?  Did you make choices based on what was available to you or based on what you want?Let’s say you go into an ice cream store craving chocolate ice cream.  In fact, you have been craving it for so long, that by the time you to the store, you can almost taste it.  By the time you get to the counter, you can almost feel the relief of the chocolate hitting your tongue.  Yet when you place your order, they tell you they only have vanilla and strawberry, but not chocolate.  What do you do?You can’t choose chocolate, as that is no longer available.  Do you continue to beg for it, in hopes that it will become available or do you make a new choice?Your choices here are simple:1-    Choose vanilla or strawberry, so you can at least have ice cream.2-    Leave the store without ice cream.3-    Go to a different ice cream store in hopes of finding chocolate elsewhere.Relationships are the best place to look in terms of making realistic choices.  Whether you’re dealing with friends, co-workers or a significant other, we all have to make choices about what to accept in these relationships.  Are you in a relationship that doesn’t make you happy?  What do you do about it? Do you keep choosing “chocolate” as if it’s a realistic choice?  Even though it is not?Make good choices:1-    Look at the things in your life that don’t make you happy.2-    Look carefully at what you have done to make it different.3-    List the choices that are available to you.4-    Now choose from that list.Even if the choice isn’t really what you want, because you truly want “chocolate,” at least you can live into the choice you have made.  You will be surprised to find that choosing vanilla, or choosing to leave without ice cream, is actually less frustrating than continuing to choose a flavor the simply is not available to you.Making choices based on what’s available will open up other possibilities in your life.  Maybe you will discover you actually like vanilla.  Or that while you were waiting patiently for chocolate, they created a new flavor that is even better!