Pick your poison

 

Sometimes, You Have to 'Pick your poison'...

In life, surprises are but the norm of the day. Take out surprises, that isn't life anymore. But 'picking your poison' is our perennial dilemma. How many times when your options to choose from were seemingly non-options to you ?

Bitter pills to swallow. Lesser of two evils. The tough nut versus the hard one. The immovable versus the unstoppable. That skirmish or this tiff. That usurious 5/6 lender or that laundering syndicate. That illegitimate option or that illegal one. Either way you lose. Either option you won’t be keen to pick up but when your only option left is to pick your poison, you have to pick up the gauntlet and take it from there.

But hold on. By conventional wisdom, you didn’t end up in that dilemma with you coming from nowhere. Things have evolved. Situations have progressed. Circumstances have shaped the subsequent events leading you to that narrow path offering you the damn hardest choices in your life.

This becomes your very moments of discernment. Akin to the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican, when white smoke billows up, then the College of Cardinals have chosen the next Pope. If gray smoke billows from there, the cardinals remain in those moments of discernment.

Signages or no signages, this is the call of the wild. There’s no exit clause from hereon, no escape clause. You take the left turn, bandits could be waiting for you down that narrow path. Take the right turn, there could be land mines along the stretches of that dirt road.

Back to this Covid pandemic where we are all stuck, the past six-seven months, a lot of us would have been staring at two poisons to pick from. Had you not picked your poison yet, you may be nothing but damaged goods by now. You’re done. It’s game over for you.

But before we get so comfie with signages, take it from Ernest Hemingway when he said: 'We have to get used to the idea that at the most important crossroads in our life there are no signs'. Fair enough?