WHICH WAY TO GO?

The late, great philosopher Yogi Berra once opined, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Well, of course! We’ve all been there in our lives. We come to a point where we have to make a decision on what to do, which way to go, which option to choose. We can’t just stand there and gape. We have to make a decision and hope and pray that it is the right one, that we take the correct fork in the road.

How do we know what to do? Sometimes the answer is clear and we have no doubts about what to do. But not always given all the uncertainties in life. Even when we truly believe we made the right decision, events can happen that prevent the outcome that we had hoped. Perhaps we can never know for sure that we are taking the right fork in the road, but we have to take one anyway.

So how do we move on in quiet confidence even, with some trepidation of course? There’s an old African proverb that might help. “If you keep your head and heart going in the right direction, you won’t have to worry about your feet.” Exactly! My Mom used to tell us, “Use your head” after we had done something foolish, made the wrong choice. It was too late to undo what happened. She was just reminding us that if we had indeed used our head, we wouldn’t have done what we did.

Managers and coaches always tell their players the same thing: “Keep you head in the game.” When they do not, bad things happen. So, too, in life. If we keep using our head, keeping it in the game of life, if you will, we will more often than not make the right decision, take the right fork in the road.

But sometime more is also decided. If our heart is not into what we are doing, we will get into trouble, make wrong decisions. Athletes often retire earlier than what might seem normal because they will tell us that their hearts aren’t in it any more. People change jobs even though they are doing great work where they are because their heart isn’t in it any more. They need to move on and take another fork in their road in life.

When our head and our heart into what we are doing, where we are going, more often than not our feet will take us in the right direction. Yes, given the fact that we are not in total control of our life, the road we take, the decisions we make, might not turn out the way we had anticipated or hoped. That’s simply life. But even when that happened, what we discovered was that we made the best of it.

That is all we can hope for and, I believe, all that God asks of us or we can ask of ourselves. If we use our head, keep it in the game, and if we put our heart and soul into what we are doing and how we are living, more often than not our feet will take us where we need to go. And even when we do take the wrong road, somehow our head and our heart will get us back onto the right path – as we have all learned from experience.