“You did this,” he murmured to the man in the mirror. “Every step and misstep brought you to this place. Oh, you had some help and some enablers along the way, but the responsibility is all yours. No one manipulated your fate to put you here; this is the sum total of your every action all tallied together.”
He surveyed the room, thinking, and realized this was so.
“If I had done this before, I would be in a different place now. The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, but the second-best time is now. And so now, where do I plant the first tree?”
He surveyed his life and looked for fertile soil. At first he thought he saw only fertilizer, but then he realized it was the despair talking.
“I can do this,” he said. “All I have to do is decide what ‘this’ is.”
Just as he needed to decide, waves of indecision washed over him and held him in place.
“No, not now,” he insisted and resisted. “Now is not the time to sit and wait. The waiting must end. Time now to act.”
But what? Do what? Act how? The choices were endless, and he had to pick one.
“Of course! I can — no, that would — then this — this is the way — but that might lead me down to —”
The second guesses led to third guesses and on beyond zebra. “Are you really making Dr. Suess references now?” he scoffed, but the thought made him laugh, and he remembered the admonition to “be silly sometimes.”
“What if I were to be silly every day?” he asked himself, but, “No, that’s what got me into this mess in the first place: I overdosed on silliness. Or was I not silly enough? Should I have taken silly to the next level?”
And just like that, he was focused on the past again.
“Stop looking back, this is today,” he repeated like a mantra, until he worked his way back to the present moment. All was fuzzy around him, but that was his aging eyes fooling him. Clarity began to arrive, slowly but decidedly.
“Decidedly,” he sighed. “That word again. I really must decide what to do. Bold action all at once. Oh, no, baby steps, one at a time. What am I going to do?”
He took a next step, and it was the one that made all the difference.
