When we are born we are seldom being given cues that should guide our lives in an almost unconscious way. We are taught many an elementary skills whose applications occur in our lives as a normality we have even forgotten we were taught if not modelled to live. Some of the normal things we do have been imposed on us by the natural environment as we react to the stimuli it generates in us as and when nature behaves in one way or the other.
As humans, and arguably the only species in the animal kingdom with a cognitive consciousness, we are endowed with the competence to be deliberate in how we shape our relationships with nature, fellow man, and the supernatural we have labelled one name or the other, including making the fact that we don't believe a supernatural type equivalent to what we argue does not exist. In these relationships the most important is one that define us in our life occurrence. It is how we ultimately become in our world that will define what we are, should be, and have been inside it.
In this rendition, I am contributing to the many how to's out there about living a life many can define as a good life. In this contribution I am angling of the three decisions that can make or break a person for his/her entire life occurrence. This is written out of the experiences I have thus far lived, the teachings I have thus far received, the modelling I have thus far being exposed to, and the transcendental exposures I have been through. It is a rendition I pen for posterity's sake, and for the sake of my descendants to try and live, and if need be adopt as a base template to bring the rest of the threads connecting what they would ultimately call life together. These are the decisions to be treasured, respected and revered as well as being venerated.
The decisions of your parents about your life.
Our parents have an influence in who we ultimately become. The first decision they took that define us is to have the sex that led to our conception. They would the decide or consent on who we should be called. In some instances our mothers even decides who they are going to tell us is our father.
Our parents decisions define our physical address, and through that the opportunity space we ultimately find ourselves in. They choose socialisation spaces for us. They shape the contents of what would ultimately be the foundation of our character. The define and model trails we will one day have to make choices about. For as long as we are children to them they will make and take decisions on our behalf.
Our only risk about their decisions is their quality, form and character. It is not the correctness or otherwise of our parent's decisions that creates issue with our lives, it is the content and quality of those decisions that will define who we become.
The most crucial of these parents are the biological ones. They are our first reception committee into this world. The basics on being in this world is in their full and total control. How they walk, eat, love, talk, and, and, will shape how we will ultimately do same. There will then be the many other parents that will give birth to us into the many aspects of life we will perpetually be infants to and in.
Our teachers will give birth to us as writing babies. They will parent us through the schooling system our biological parents volunteered us into. Our pastors will birth our spiritual us, generally in support of, or consolidating what our biological parents may have started. There are other parents that will emerge when the child in us appears and reappears. Some we will call coaches, and some we will designate mentors, while some will simply be our role models. Role models will be those whose lives become an abstraction of the us we wish to realise.
The decisions we take when our parents are no longer there to take them for and on our behalf
This is what I refer to as the outside of nest decisions. The decisions whose quality will reflect the posterior nature of your parents decisions. These decisions have you as the accountability final point. It is you and you alone that will be taking those decisions. Your true character, sometimes even independent to how you were shaped will be instructional to how you process those decisions.
The most defining about these decisions is when you have to angle into questioning, including reversing, some of the decisions your parents made about your life. Reviewing your parents's decisions about you is an important aspect of transitioning yourself into the true you you should and want to be. It is an act that converges you unique self and the foundational self you have become. It brings together aspects of your backgrounding and the 'winner' or 'otherwise' you might be.
What you would be having as a provision into the world of your own decisions is the backgrounding you went through, the proverbial breastfeeding you got from 'parents', the way in which you left all the nests nature created for you. We are sometimes quick to get out of the nest, or the oven we are still being baked inside it. It will be the genetic variability of our being, and how it relates to the decisions we took, that will be defining to the content, form, character, and ultimately the quality of our decisions.
Decisions of our parents are mere templates and frameworks. Following and/or referring to them guarantees continuity of intergenerational uniformity without vitiating the sacredness of our uniqueness as human beings. Templates will always shift and marginally change, but frameworks fracture upon templates, and when all these happen as you take decisions, it is your decisions that you will ultimately live with and be accountable to.
Our decisions are therefore the other scaffolding upon which we will always stand as we construct the tower of our joy, happiness, and/or otherwise. The beauty about life, like nature, it oftentimes give us an opportunity to do mid course corrections and either reset to all defaults, or recalibrate to take on new challenges. We should thus respect, appreciate, and revere our decisions, they are as much us as those made by our parents, loving or otherwise.
Then there are decisions that God takes about us.
This is aptly explained by the story of Jonah in the Bible. Jonah acted like any adult would do. He took a decision to go to Tar-shish for reasons only his then wisdom would present. What he did not know was that, that particular decision was never his to take, it belonged to his God.
Second to that is the decision Peter took to cut the ear of one of the arresting soldiers when Jesus had to be taken to Pontius Pilate for judgement. In that act, Peter displayed the ultimate of his loyalty to Christ. What Peter did not know was that the decision of how he should react was never his to make. Kudus paused and took the ear and restored it.
This and many other examples in the Christian Faith, and I submit even in other faiths, attest to the reality of life deciding on a course for you, with or without your permission. Humanity has found ways to address this matter, the gave it as many a name as they could. There are those that decided to give it a status of non-existence. In the world that I traversed and lived I have called it and believe it to be God in His Trinity self.
It should thus be everyone's prayer that your parents decisions about you be so solid that the become a template with which you will take decisions that are within the path your God has destined for you.
I pray and hope this message finds you well and receiving to its intents.
🙏🏿Amen
🙏🏿A ndzo khongela, ndzi nyika rito
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