Have you ever seen dominoes fall…one after another?  My favorite domino set up is the one from Disney’s “Robots” — I cannot imagine the amount of time and patience it must take to set something like that up.  But how many of us have allowed one domino to fall after another?  Especially, if the domino falling is a bad decision?  For example, if I eat a donut and then feel guilty about one donut, why not just feel really guilty and eat two?  And then, since I am at it, let’s order a “meal” at one of the fast food restaurants (super sized, of course), and then top it off with something from the dessert menu.  But I am not done…I still have to eat dinner.  Get my point?  Have we all been there?  You bet.  But how many times do we self-sabotage and grant ourselves excuses because we think we have to  — because one domino fell over.  But it doesn’t always work that way.  Sometimes, the dominoes are set up in such a way that if one doesn’t fall just right, then the rest don’t fall at all.  And we get upset about that because we want them to fall.  When we make choices in our lives, we can choose to stop them from falling.  We can decide that having one donut does not mean that we have to have two.  I will be honest — I have done this…granting myself permission (even justifying) for the second donut.  Does this sound familiar?  “I’m messing up my calories with one donut so I might as well really mess it up.”  But we forget that we still have free will and are not forced to continue something that we don’t want.  There are people out there that have continued down the wrong path, making one wrong decision after another.  And then what happens?  The dominoes are falling so fast, branching out in so many different directions,  that they  are unsure of which row to stop first.  They find themselves chasing something that does not want to be stopped.  Sound like someone you know?  But what if I reminded you of one simple thing, would you do what you could to stop the pull of gravity on each tile that has not fallen?  Most of us may not believe that stopping one tile will matter because of all the ones that have already fallen.  That is our hang-up — we look at what has fallen and not what has to yet to fall.  Our free will and our willingness to follow it alters the course of the preset trajectory of that one domino that lay before us.  It does not need to fall.  So we must take action to make sure that it will not carry on the course it was intended to make.   But will we?  Will we choose — with a definitive action — that the last domino has indeed fallen?  Or will we feel that our free will has been taken from us and do nothing to stop it?  Life will not make it easy for us to choose, but the choice is still ours to make.  Don’t give in to the easy choice.  “Never Surrender” by Corey Hart

Michelle A. Homme  2013 ©