The Power of Decision when not even Miracle Max can help...

Up until last week’s entry, we’ve all been discussing some serious questions. I think the discussion has been very good. We each bring something different to the table. This thought track and recent events have brought me personally to a point of decision on several things that—up until now—have been things I’ve been either avoiding or dabbling in inconsistently over the last year.

What happened you ask? (And even if you didn’t ask, I’m going to tell you.)

On Friday, one of our cars died. Not mostly dead…we’re talking all the way dead…the kind of dead where you go through its pockets for loose change dead. My first reaction was well this stinks! I was actually more verbal than “stinks” but for the purposes here, “stinks” will suffice. But the real scope of this change has taken a new form. It’s not merely inconvenient not having two cars, it demands a change in my family’s lifestyle.

I’ve always taken for granted having two cars. Look at most households in America and you’ll see two cars. Ask yourself, do they even build new houses anymore that don’t have a two car garage? You have to go into older developments to see the house with a single car garage nowadays. It’s just not the standard of living today to have only one car. It is just assumed that you have at least two cars in your family and that standard of living is easily promoted. Think on that. Is this a belief system you fall into? I certainly did.

My knee-jerk reaction was “where am I going to get the money to buy another car…right away?” The response was deafening, “I’m not.” Over the next several days, I’ve been thinking through this problem and have come to the realization that: yes, it is inconvenient and yes, it means a change in our lifestyle, but this is not necessarily a bad thing.

This event will only be bad if my family and I choose to let it be a “bad” thing. We have the choice to embrace the change this means and use this experience to enhance our lives rather than diminish them. I won’t necessarily go into the various changes that we’re making but this brings me to a corollary to our previous discussions. This gets at the root of thinking for a change.

We are all at this point in our lives due to sum of our thought and the decisions we’ve made up until this point. Every decision we make guides this path we follow. I can decide to react to this and allow my environment to dictate where I’ll be tomorrow or I can decide to capitalize on this experience, galvanize the moment to institute a paradigm change within our current lifestyle. I can decide to use this experience as a catalyst to making better decisions down the road.

In school, “go with the flow” was my motto. Going with the flow has led me to this point. Don’t get me wrong, I am very successful in many areas of life compared to many of my peers, but that success is limited to the scope of thought I maintain. Compared to Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, I may not be successful. However, rather than compare this level of success to their lives, isn’t better to adjust my scope so that it more closely matches what my potential is and my life focus. It all comes down to the decisions we make.

So, I’ve managed in this entry to stray into a series of tangents…and deep thoughts. And while, I cannot think of any really good Jack Handey Deep Thought quotes, I will leave you with this last SNL parallel that relates to the changes we are making in light of this situation.

Not having a car, means I have to catch a bus into the office each day…luckily, it passes at the end of my street and only costs me an additional $1 each way, not so bad eh? Well what this means though is that I now have to get up 1 to 2 hours earlier than I did when I had the car. So, harnessing this new way of thinking and putting theory to practice I decided to begin eating breakfast in the morning and begin to work out—up until this point in time, I was never a breakfast eater (breakfast if any consisted of a donut and a can of Mountain Dew from the gas station on my way to work) and I’ve always been inconsistent with regular exercise (236 lbs later is proof enough). So, I got up on Monday, ready to take action…and I poured out this bowl of cereal that had nuts, cornflakes, and cranberries –a generic cereal from the local grocer—after adding milk my first mouthful was like chomping into a small pile of rocks and sticks. It was absolute work getting through that bowl of cereal. I probably didn’t even need to go to the gym that afternoon…I probably burned as many calories eating the stuff as I gained by eating the stuff. But it got me thinking of the good old SNL days—and I know Eric and Woody will truly appreciate this.

“How many bowls of your cereal do you think would equal a single bowl of Colon Blow?”
“Two?”
“No”
“Four?”
“No”
“Seven?”
“No, try one more time!”
“Ten.”
“No, not ten. It would take over 500 bowls of your current cereal to match the amount of fiber in one bowl of Colon Blow.”
“Wow, that’s a lot of Fiber!”
“And coming soon, SUPER Colon Blow!”

Do I need to type anymore? If you didn’t get it at this point, it wasn’t worth getting. Man, I really miss Phil Hartman. “Colon Blow” how funny was that?!