Every moment in life offers you a choice. You can hit snooze for the third time, OR you can get up early and go running. You can skip breakfast and gulp down an Extra Large Dunkin D Coffee, OR you can eat a bowl of fresh cut fruit with oatmeal. You can drive to work like a man possessed, pushing for every advantage to get to work those 3 minutes faster, OR you can decide to be the guy that let's the other car make that impossible left turn. Every moment offers us those choices, if we only open our eyes and see them for what they are.
But not all choices are equal.
I didn't have to call "The Card Dude". Keeping The Card was a choice. If I had thrown it away that first day, this story wouldn't need to be told and I would be a rather different person. Calling The Card Dude ("TCD") was another, and somewhat bigger, choice. With the call, I "chose" action and "carpe diem" over the mundane safety of my comfortable life. With that call, I chose to be "another me", if only for a moment, with no idea who that might turn out to be.
As I sat looking at the phone after being "ordered" to the TCD's place, I realized I was being presented a much larger and (seminally) profound choice. It was one of those "Big Life Choices" that we get from time to time. It was a choice between a lingering (but inconvenient) fantasy and a "hard to contemplate" reality, between serotonic comfort and adrenaline rush, between a control-oriented brain, and the unprobed recesses of my inner void (um... so to speak...)
Some part of me, the responsible/dependable part, calmly reminded: "You don't have to go. Just walk away now, and chuck this whole thing up to an *interesting* life experience. In a few weeks, it will all seem like a funny dream." And as the rest of me heard these soothing words, I felt the lightness of being that often follows a near traumatic moment.
I became me, again.
I left my office, jumped into my car and allowed muscle memory to make all the turns, stops and starts that represent my 13.5 minute drive home. But 43 minutes later, I was still driving and my heart-rate picked up as TCD's rather ordinary house came into view.
Apparently, choices, profound or otherwise, aren't always made with one's brain.
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