The Decision

Perhaps you've been faced with this decision, and although you had no way of knowing the outcome of your choice, you had a gut feeling of how it might play out, and you knew it would be life changing.

It's never expected, but suddenly you find yourself staring deeply into another's eyes; your world shudders, and you know you have only moments to make the decision of your life.

You so much want to abandon all caution, throw your fate to the unpredictable winds, turn your back on all your plans, your comforts, your security and follow blindly. And deep inside you sense how it will unwind, the period, far too short and tumultuous, of ecstasy and unimaginable highs, followed by the shattering of your life, leaving you to sort the emotional, mental, spiritual and likely physical and financial wreckage, sensing that it will take a least a decade to gather up the scattered pieces, and that the scars will last a life time.

The other choice is to break the spell, turn and walk away. But then, each day as you wake to a familiar alarm and go through the routine of starting a familiar day, as you emotionally sleepwalk through comfortable and secure days that become years, you always pause in that surreal moment of first awakening to think of how it might have been, of all you could have had.

Or you might be the lucky one in a million who both said yes and then had it all, a life-long intoxicating roller coaster ride.

You may even have faced this decision more than once and survived to tell about it.

Or you may have been spared the decision, and, if so, it's hard to say whether you should be envied or pitied.