Do you believe you only live
once? When I was a child I was taught there was no life before this one. It was
drilled into me that if I died before Judgment Day there would be no life after
death, unless I had been really, really … I mean REALLY … good and did all the
things I was taught on Sunday and throughout the week.
As I grew older I came to
believe that life is eternal and, though we may have different bodies or
expression through time, there is no end to the life energy within each of us.
I developed a strong conviction that I had lived lives before this one and that
my spirit will go on to live after my body dies, either on this plane of
existence or others.
But Warren Buffet changed my
mind last week. (I’ll bet in a thousand years you did NOT see that coming!) John
G. Taft, the author of “Stewardship: Lessons learned from the lost culture
of Wall Street,” recently wrote about the greatest sayings of Buffett. In the
article he refers to the “punch card analogy” Buffett uses in the context of
investment and finance. Taft suggests that it can apply to life in general as
well.
Briefly, this punch card idea
states that we have a limited number of key decision-making events that occur
in our lives. If your “life card” has twenty places to punch on it, once you
make one of those choices you have only nineteen left. Think about the old
amusement parks rides that took a different number of tickets for each ride. When
your roll of tickets was gone you went home. “What?” you say? “Talk of
limitation from a religious science minister who believes in our unlimited
potential?” Yes, in a way, so mark this down as one of those times.
This idea goes quite well with the
belief that we have freedom of choice, but not of consequence. Choosing a drama
over a comedy at the theater or pasta instead of salad for dinner probably
isn’t going result in some earth-shattering or otherwise monumental change. If
I choose the comedy film followed by the pasta it’s probably not going to be
something memorable ten years from now unless, of course, that cute Italian waiter
is my next ex-husband.
Narrowing our choices and
choosing wisely can have a tremendous impact on our overall happiness and
satisfaction with life. Too many choices of anything can stop us from moving
forward – ask any couple who had to decide on what color(s) to paint the bathroom.
Conversely, only one or two choices can feel like it’s
“damned-if-I-do-damned-if-I-don’t,” which for me translates into “I’m powerless
and a victim.”
The danger here is taking an
attitude of “I don’t care” on one end of the spectrum and “I have to do this”
on the other. Very few of our daily decisions fall soundly on either end. Most
are in the middle. The rest lean more toward one side or the other.
Our job is to decide just how
much energy we want to put into our decisions. To assist with decision making
think about this: How important will
this decision be in five years? In ten years? Or, If I had been given only one
more year to live, what different choices would I make?
I suggest to you that there
will never, ever be another unique person exactly like you through whom God
(Spirit, if you prefer) can experience life. Be confident in your decisions.
Choose wisely. And, above all, make sure God’s having a good time in the
process, since you are that which God is!
In Spirit, Truth and
Playfulness,
Terry
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