Choosing right

This year, I have suddenly, unexpectedly, unobtrusively just had a change in my perception. Maybe it was triggered by a very intense and busy 2024, maybe because I am observing how my parents are aging and struggling with their health and I can’t imagine my life without them, maybe that happens the year you turn 40 – or maybe it was the morning where my almost 5-year-old called out ‘look I can open the door by myself!’ Suddenly he is tall enough to reach the door handle, suddenly he can switch on the light, suddenly I am stopped in my tracks, suddenly I perceive – how I need to choose right, right now.

I have learnt over the years that the truth is very rare indeed. We each live with our perceptions, and I guess each perception can be legitimized. A ‘God bless you’ can very quickly turn into a curse if your actions conflict with someone else’s wants and needs. Religion can so often be used as a weapon to manipulate, or judge or explain hard things that you don’t feel comfortable facing. But all religions in their core have the same message – simplicity, love, harmony, peace. How much of my life is measured against expectation, performance, status, industry? How much of my life is measured against calm, peace, time with my family, having time to breathe and to connect with a higher being?  And the harshness steps in when you start to choose right – when you draw a line, when you set a boundary, when you start to say no and suddenly the blessings around you start to crumble and fall away. What you are left with in this post-modernistic world is the strangest sense of wonder, at the bizarreness of our perceptions and how we see them as an entitled truth.

I have learnt to be grateful for the harsh words and the piercing stares, to look at them like a newborn looks at an incomprehensible world. A world I am grateful for, but I don’t always need to be a part of. I have learnt to be appreciative to every person who really knows me, every whiteboard message of encouragement, every sincere message of love. I live in a world of wonder and awe – every child that I get to work with, every family I get to support, every dream I can help to make a reality is a privilege. But then also for every moment I just get to be a mom, a wife, a person – without industry or expectation, just because I am, just because that was what I was created to be.

Today when I stopped home after work, my son ran to me trying his best to stifle a grin. He has a surprise for me, he says, with his hand in front of his mouth. Then the big reveal! He lost his first tooth today, and after the shock of the blood and the fact that he realized he will actually survive, he is so proud of this sign of biological maturation. He is so proud of time passing by – so very quickly. He wants us to celebrate it, he has been waiting for so long.

Tonight, as he drifts to sleep, I get to play tooth mouse. I get to be the one who writes a minute letter and scatter ground in a trail from the window to his slippers which he placed, perfectly aligned in front of his bed, with this treasure – a part of himself in it. I can give him some coins, but what monetary value can be placed on a part of himself? A part that he so eagerly exchanges for a worldly reward.

And that makes me think. What is the price for the parts of myself that I scatter freely, recklessly, without even thinking twice? How much value do I place on myself, my time, my resources, my soul?  From now on I will endeavour to choose right, to not wait any longer, to not delay. I want to fill my time with meaning, with peace, even if it comes at a cost. I want to value all parts of my being, as being precious commodities. I want to choose right, starting right now.