Decisions

Decisions

I’m going to tell you the story of a woman who was in jail for life imprisonment for first degree murder. One day, she realized that there was a way of escaping and she carefully planned it. Every time someone died the bells tolled at night and the burier came and took the dead body. So she thought: I’m going to become a friend of the burier, and one day, when a person dies, I’m going to get inside the coffin and he’s going to take me away. And so she did! Once they were friends, the burier agreed on her plan. Some weeks passed and one night, the bells ding-donged… So she soon prepared herself, cheated the guards of the prison and ran to the basement. It was completely dark but she felt the coffin and the corpse which was lying in it, she got inside the coffin, closed it and waited until her friend, the burier, came. The man came and nailed the coffin but she wasn’t scared, because those nails meant her freedom, which was near. She felt when her friend took the coffin, passed through the gates of the prison, and took it to the cemetery. She also felt when the man buried the coffin 3 meters underground and started to cover the coffin with ground. She remained peaceful because she knew that he was going to come and unbury her an hour later. But you know, curiosity killed the cat, and she wanted to know who the woman buried with her was, so she lit a match and looked, and next to her, lied her friend, the burier…

Now if I ask you how would you describe this woman’s fate? You’d probably tell me It was really bad luck but, wasn’t it her decision to escape from prison in that way? So, was it bad luck or bad choice? And maybe again, you tell me it was bad luck, and you know why?

Because we are used to saying bad luck to almost all the bad things that happen to us, it is something external that makes things go wrong. But what I think is that bad luck is sometimes an excuse for complications in life, I strongly believe that bad luck is often confused with bad choices.

And why do we blame bad luck? It’s easy! Nobody likes to be wrong. By blaming external forces for our problems, we avoid feeling responsible and therefore, we avoid the feeling of finding ourselves guilty. Luck is independent from our choices and wishes. Bad luck is something we couldn’t have avoided.

Opinions may widely differ, but today, I’d like you to focus on decisions, choices in life. Decisions about what is good or bad for us and they’ll sooner or later affect our lives.

We face thousands of decisions every day. To my surprise, I found out that we make up to 5,000 decisions each day - what time to get up, what to wear, what to eat, who to phone…we take many decisions in seconds, it is something that occurs so fast that we are hardly aware of it.

Planning, solving problems, reducing errors; all this depends on being able to take decisions correctly. Sometimes you have to make very hard

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