Take
the Fork
“If
you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
Yogi
Berra
Yogi
Berra reminds me of that hookah-smoking caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland with his idioms of wisdom or nonsense. “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over,” and “You
can observe a lot just by watching,” come to mind. But if you sit with them for
a little while, you find that in their simplicity and obviousness, there is a
pearl. The fork in the road quote seems to suggest that we should take the road
presented to us in whatever crossroads of life we come to. This one is easy if
you are a person who trusts your gut; not so easy if you require mathematical precision,
or a proper algorithm, for any move you make. We can hesitate so long we miss
the opportunity before us.
Self-doubt
can cause a brain freeze. But the truth is that any decision we make, whichever
fork we take, will have pros and cons, because it will have unforeseen consequences.
Here is an example: I made the decision to marry after my sophomore year in
college. We moved from the mountains of North Carolina to California, and then
to Florida, and then to South Carolina, and then to the eastern end of North
Carolina; then we divorced and both of us remarried. From there I moved to New
York City, and then to Durham, and finally back to Florida, where I finished
college. The bottom line is, I was 31 years old and had a child before I
finished that undergraduate degree. But the ten years between leaving college
and finishing college gave me an education of a different sort. I learned a lot
about the world, and how people from different places think and live
differently. It was the college of life and location, and I value that every
bit as much as the degree—maybe more.
Every
day we arrive at a different fork in the road. Whichever way we go will teach
us something new if we are open to learning. So, today when you arrive at that
fork, take it.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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