Choose yourself, every time.
Why should you have to choose?
Who would put you in a place
Of either them or you?
If they’re sincere, they’ll build you up,
Not work to keep you down.
These are the friends that we should seek
And hold when they are found.
…Of course there are exceptions
In moments when life shifts.
Such moments, they are rare,
And are times we can’t predict;
When our hearts say something’s greater
Than ourselves alone, we’ve known.
They are times we can’t explain,
But when we feel, we go:
Choosing the something Greater,
As our minds and souls believe.
Maybe we are wrong, but
We’re compelled the same to see.
I began this poem with a starting perspective. I thought it was finished with the first two stanzas, but the more I thought about it, I knew it was incomplete. There are always exceptions, moments we feel something greater than ourselves, when a course may appear to go against our own self-interest, but we follow in search for something greater in our actions even when what that is remains undefined to us. In these exceptions, we act on hope and faith in the ideal of something greater, not the ourselves we understand.
Sometimes we’re right. Sometimes we’re wrong, but there are moments when we feel compelled to go against what we see and know and follow, all the same, upon a course into the unknown. Sometimes these are the most interesting and revealing experiences we live. It is these moments that change and redirect lives.
Writing this was a little like life. We make a plan, follow it, and when we believe to be the end, we realize it’s incomplete. There is more to it that needs learned, lived, defined, and so we carry on in a direction and intent we didn’t see starting out. Perspectives and directions change. It’s not a bad thing, just life lived.