this, that, and the other

some of the decisions that have led me to where i am now could be said to have been made for me. because that's the way things were done or because perhaps there were no other valid options. some of them may not have been decisions at all--more unconscious treading through life, not really watching where i was going.

looking back it's hard to pinpoint the things that made now the precise now that it is, rather than the millions of completely different circumstances it might have become. the choice i made not to kiss my prom date goodnight six long Aprils ago. the choice i made to skip taking drama in high school but then plod through one semester of it in college. the choice i made to date that redhead even when i knew people would wonder if i was insane. conscious choices, they were, tied to a certain idea of myself, however vague or naive.

the unconscious ones? always getting good grades, always writing stories, always following my parents to church. i did not decide these things. they just happened.

so which made the most difference? i don't think i can tell yet. maybe it isn't fair to distinguish the conscious from the unconscious decision. my road still stretches out in front of me. so far it hasn't been such a difficult road.

"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

i think we are all learning to trust ourselves. but before we find that place we may lean on the ideals of others and take from them what we can, sharing our own selves in exchange. i suppose i might end up a glued-together mosaic of a person by the time i'm brave enough to thoroughly be my own.