Doing the Right Thing isn’t always the easiest thing…..
Yesterday I took action on a problem and now I’m feeling relieved, yet I still feel the echos of panic that I’ve been plagued with over the last two months. But I made my decision, I did it, and now I can move on.
First of all it was a tremendous amount of work to compile all the information, then it took courage to talk about it, then my ego took another beating when I was asked questions I couldn’t answer. That stuff is hard.
As we moved my mother recently, she took time to go over boxes of old letters she had saved. She made packets for each of us four girls to read what we had written her many years ago. There were chirpy little missives from me from the late sixties–part of the time I was a college student, and part of the time I was a radical deeply involved in The Movement–stopping the war in Viet Nam and breaking down racial barriers in society. But from both situations, what came across was that I was a very sweet person who loved her family, was very fond of her parents and had a deep desire to stay connected to them.
And I’m that same person today, just older and wiser (as my dad used to say, “Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment….”), so, now I practice some good judgment, just not all the time. I mentioned that to my mother and in talking about it, realized that it is that sweet girl, who wants to be liked, to belong, that is the part of me that gets scared, feels panic, is afraid somehow that things won’t work out.
Thank goodness I have developed more parts of myself that I can turn to–because it was necessary to push ahead and not let fear paralyze me. And I did it.
And even if it doesn’t create the result I would like, taking action, Doing the Right Thing feels really good.