off the beaten track

Picked up the new macbook today.  I’ve had my eye on upgrading for a while, although I couldn’t decided whether to go with the MacBook Air or the MacBook.  In the end price and lack of a decent sized hard drive drove me away from the air, whose most endearing feature is it’s thinness.  Time Machine made it a breeze to move my old MacBook files over to the new MacBook and amazingly fast as well.  Of course all the things I had planned to do today have pretty much gone out the window as I have been playing with my new mac and wiping down the old one so I can pass it on clean.

I woke up this morning feeling the time to make a decision is now.  There are so many competing forces for my time, focus, and energy.  To try to do everything means to do nothing.  I have to choose a path on faith and intent.  But it’s so hard to know what is the right choice to make.  What will I miss if I go down one road as oppose to another?  And that is the crux of my problem, I want to go down all the roads, travel all the paths.  I hate the thought of being contained to one path.  Like this past weekend when we were hiking across the moorlands, it would have been easier to stay on the marked path, the one well trodden by others.  Instead, we chose to make our own path.  We ran into more obstacles/challenges this way, but that is what made the walk exciting.  The marked paths were teeming with people.  Off the beaten track, we saw only two other people and they were off in the distance, probably a pair of souls like our own, wanting to go the way less travelled.

But what are the risks when you go your own way?  What if the bold choices we make don’t pan out, then what do you do?  Is it better to play it safe, be on an even keel as it where?  The two sides of myself sit on either shoulder; one is whispering in my ear to live in the here and now and throw caution to the wind, the other sitting on my opposite shoulder is whispering, be sensible think about the future.  The thing about the future is there are too many what if’s and unknowns, and the ultimate destination is the end of all things.

I have made my choice.  Now can I live with the consequences?  Will I have the discipline and the tenacity to stay the course?

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