Walls

There comes a time in your life periodically when you must answer to the decisions you made. I cannot explain why the results of choices can be so delayed, but they are quite frequently. Be it a mere hour after your choice or 6 months or even 10 years after the fact.

And sometimes when you are forced to face with the repercussions, either good or bad, it comes in small doses. Often you are eased into the result. But what seems to be the most frequent way to come across this need to answer to your choices is to be hit in a way that feels like running into a brick wall. One where the builder took the time to make sure each brick was in solid formation and no air gaps existed between the next. And it just happens to be the one time you decide to charge full steam ahead, running, gasping for air as your body reacts to the sudden physical push forward. Your legs ache, your lungs ache more, and as your start to sweat small beads down your forehead the wall appears out of nowhere.

The next thing you know you have a massive pounding in your head. The world slowly comes around with the colors taking their normal hue, sounds that were muffled begin to slowly harden to clearer strands, and your mind begins to clear and remember what just happened. Then you have to struggle to overcome the aches in your body to push yourself up. You groan a little with your body as it struggles to gain its footing. And then you begin to limp off.

No correlation seems to exist between the apparent size of the decision that had been made and the scope of the repercussion. I have made small and seemingly minute decisions that have built walls 5 feet thick, 100 feet tall, and ten miles long. Yet I have made decisions that altered my course in life that contain walls but 4 feet high and even some that are wooden that one can merely hurdle over.

Yet the takeaway from all of this isn't confusion or an understanding that decisions cause repercussions of all sizes and varying lengths. No, the takeaway is the despite the hardness of the wall, the resiliency of the human spirit prevails. We continually get up, ignore the aches, brush off our clothes and start the run again.