The Main Reason For The Choices We Make

Unfortunately, sometimes we make seemingly inappropriate choices that end up with negative, unforeseen consequences. We wish we could change them and had acted differently. But why does this happen, often too regularly? Perhaps because we are constantly growing and evolving, never static.

However, the real surprise is that we seldom make poor choices, regardless of the results we get, because our choices always suit the circumstances and limitations we have! If they were really poor, immediately after we made them we would also do something about them. But it's only because we get more experience of life further down the line, and are presented with greater choices as we become older, more educated and aware, that we then regret and belittle the old choices we had.

For a start, we make choices that our resources, experience, maturity, confidence, environment and information allow us to make at that time. Those six elements are crucial with every step we make in life. As those aspects change, or improve, we will make different choices, unless we get into certain habits that keep us repeating those choices. It means that if we could have done better, we would have done it. We made our choice from the options available at that moment in time, not the ones available now! They were the choices that felt RIGHT for us, and we are the only ones who knew our situation and limitations.

For example, if you lived in 1950 as a woman who had few rights at the time, and everything was governed by your husband, you cannot live in regret at what you did by knocking your decisions in 1970. It would be highly inappropriate using the opportunities of that decade to judge your past actions instead of appreciating the restrictions of your past life.

To judge yourself from a different position, years later, when you are more knowledgeable about life is to beat yourself with an unworthy stick; to pretend you were exactly the same then as now and should have known better! But that is merely the gift of hindsight which does not take into account our natural evolution from one point to another. Neither does it allow for the constraints you would have had then that you don't have now, especially if your life has improved for the better.

When we are looking backwards life is always rosier, or much worse, than the present - either one extreme or the other. That's the kind of distorted lens that the intervening years and hindsight combine to give us. Hindsight is also a product of low confidence and a desire for perfection. Hence why we might sit in the past wishing we could undo our decisions instead of accepting them as necessary foundations for what we have built in the present. We all have to develop from one point to the next, so we are always LEARNING. However, why is it that adults expect to get everything perfect every time without any further awareness as they get older?

Please be proud and happy at your past decisions because they have brought you to this point in your life! To regret them merely makes you doubt yourself, lower your confidence and focuses you on the negative aspects of life, instead of the GOOD things those choices generated, too. It really is easy to ignore those blessings when we are seeking perfection, or our expectations didn't quite work out. But it couldn't have been all bad in every way otherwise you wouldn't have advanced to where you are today, egardless of your setbacks!

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