I thought up a tact for you to try, friend:
Make your decisions standing in the rain.
Under the rain, meandering thoughts are brought to a microsecond.
Beneath a falling ocean makes honest and present even the most distant mind.
Every drip, an old memory; every drop, a new breath.
When the skies allow it, it’s the rain that brings you to a place of honesty that you cannot deny — an honesty that washes across your brow and dampens your soul as sheet after sheet of pummeling water falls.
In the rainfall, clarity is restored to your mind like a child with no understanding of a calendar or a clock. Time is a friend we can always rely upon but so too is it a train that can’t ever be slowed or stopped.
In the rain, what must be done sits — first, distinctly and with stunning clarity — upon your thoughts like the effervescent bulbs that glance your lashes.
In the rain, what’s extraneous and petty is washed away and into puddles that gather at your feet.
I promise you, friend, that “some day” is a day that never comes — and that the “one chance” you wait upon falls now from the sky by the billions like the rain you stand beneath.
Seize one.
Seize one of the many opportunities before you. Trust your choice. And by the God-given fun of some reckless tenacity, just go for it. And spit at every unjust fear and just worry, alike.
This is life’s only secret to speak of:
When you decide, you commit the most treacherously liberating act. You choose yourself.
To choose yourself is to make due of your only moment; this one! It was Thomas Merton who said that to be happy is the greatest proof of our faith, for if we are happy, we truly trust in the Cosmos. So too, when you choose yourself you prove just how grateful you are for all that you have — and what you can do without.
To choose yourself is to revere your simple mortality; acknowledging that you shall not live forever, but given this moment, by God, and damn the dissenters, you shall endeavor all the same.
When you decide, every action you thus commit with intention, in spite of the nerves and fears and jitters, strikes a large gash out of your worrymind.
Every determined thought, another chip; each defiant action, another chunk.
When you decide, and when you continually commit — showing up again and again, day after day, honoring each present moment after moment in spite of every fear and ounce of soul-burning uncertainty and stomach-churning worry; in spite of the pathetic dissenters who so desperately lack faith in themselves that they should hope, as a child throwing a tantrum, to attack the faith you have in yourself — forces of a spiritual kind celebrate and collaborate.
That is because for The Free Being to choose himself — for the self-determined soul to realize her innate and untouchable power — is the most liberating revelation in the human being’s finite life.
Muses dance. Angels sing. God smiles.
And doors open.
Indeed, upon occasion, those mysterious forces will kick down a door and show you your way.
Whether by coincidence, fate, or some angelic serendipity, the force by which those doors are kicked (and the clarity you shall see through them) will leave you stunned and in disbelief. In these rare moments, though 99 times out of 100 it is never this clear, the fog before your path is lifted and you see those steps before you, waiting to be taken.
But then you must step.
So don’t spite the fog that has befallen you today. It is where you must begin. It is where we all begin. Before the muses dance. In the silence of the space where the angels have not yet sung.
And yet, when next your decisions beg you to see them — stand in the rain.
There, what you must do — what you must decide, and who you must choose — becomes simple and apparent.
Choose you. By God, and damn the dissenters.
That you are here at all proves that your life is worth choosing.
