Selected

Ahhh, dinner last night at Wood Ranch with a good, good friend. Have you been yet? Even their patio lights are all-that good.

The menu included a smoked brisket taco, kicked up with habanero sauce and a smidge of mashed potato, and THAT is precisely what I chose. So good! Prior to this night out my friend had selected the restaurant. Even before that, say six years or so ago, we had selected each other as the kind of friend you choose to walk the day to day stuff-of-life with.

Selection is something we do almost subconsciously as we choose this or that from one moment to the next.

I recall being a young housewife of twenty and a particulargrocery shopping run I made with my new mother-in-law. I was a new and inexperienced homemaker on a very slim budget trying to stretch a dollar as far as it could go. She was in another stage of life and I marveled as she selected one extravagant item after another, thoughtlessly dropping pickled fig leaves and such into her cart. Sort of like a TV contestant on a 60 second shopping spree. Her selections weren’t based on a budget or coupons or sheer necessity like mine were. Both of our situations and current life stations had shaped our selections on that day.

But with more lasting things than entrees and restaurant choices—with things like relationships, career decisions, and other life-altering, more permanent commitments we may carry a lingering sense of regretful sadness about failed selections we’ve made in our past.

Oh, we’ve got to learn from these and then let them go. Next time a regret from the past comes to haunt just think, “what have I learned?” then let it go. On this I do practice what I preach. Learn and live. Let it go.