Positive Results by Sabrina

We didn’t get to choose our refrigerator and now we have no built-in water filter. It was the first thing we all noticed and we were very disappointed. We’ve all been working on our water consumption and now it’s going to take more planning ahead.

This is life.

We didn’t get to choose the families we were born into. 

We didn’t get to choose the neighborhoods we grew up in. 

Most of the time we didn’t get to choose our friends. Circumstances brought us together and we didn’t start choosing until we were older and had conscious abilities. How many bad habits had we already learned by then? How many missed opportunities for growth?

I keep wondering who I’d be had I had different choices made for me. I look at this shiny new refrigerator, chosen online by our landlord and I wonder if I would have made the same choice had I been the one shopping. Now we have it and we have to make do. We look at the new features and blessings…like the fact that I no longer have to manually defrost the freezer every two weeks and I’m grateful to have it. But I wonder what I’m missing out on.

The same is true for life. There are so many amazing aspects of my life that I am proud of. Every. Single. Day. But I wonder who I would have become with different choices made for me. Talking to a friend recently about the books she read while her mom was pursuing a degree, I laughed about the romance smut I read growing up. I LOVED those books, because I didn’t know any better. But those books did not give me an education in anything I could apply in my adult life outside of my hopeless, romantic heart, lol. There have been so many subjects I’ve had to consciously study and learn as an adult because they weren’t part of my environment when I was growing up.

I did not grow up as an athlete. I did not watch and study inspirational sports figures. I did not follow the career of amazing women fighting for justice, education, access and inclusion. In my college courses people would reference names with the ease that I speak of my cousins and I wondered what I’d missed. Was this someone we talked about in class? Was I absent that day? I could see these holes in my knowledge and it often left me feeling inept. But what I lacked in general knowledge, I’ve always made up for in drive and desire to learn. 

We can mourn what we don’t know and fear that we’re starting off behind everyone else, or we can make it a goal to learn. In school we wrote down words that we didn’t recognize in our daily reading with the assignment of defining and using them going forward. This is my tool for adulthood. When someone references a person, term or topic that I’m unfamiliar with, I make a note and look it up later. When I find people discussing things with the ease that I discuss my children’s habits and personalities, I make a note and decide if I want to invest the time into learning about those topics too. 

We don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t know who we would have become had things before today gone another way. But I believe that we have some control over who we become tomorrow.  

When you look in the mirror and don’t enthusiastically love the person you’re looking at today, you have the tools to work on making tomorrow a little different. I will continue to remind you, we do not have a time machine. We’re not going back to who we were yesterday, for good or for bad. All we can do is use the tools we have in front of us and start building the future that we desire. 

Education is often just a click away. Knowledge is readily available. We’re building communities of support that will help us bridge the gap between what we currently have and what we desire. We can’t always control the cards that have been dealt to us, but we get to choose how we play them.

(And if I haven’t used a diverse enough selection of analogies, let me know. The tool of language is one of my favorites and I choose to use it to help you become the person of your dreams!)

What do you need to let go of today so that you have space to learn something new tomorrow? What is one small step that you’re going to take this week to better equip the person you want to be next year? Share your goals and let us cheer you on!