Opportunities Revisited
The photographs in this post are by Melissa Madison.
© All rights reserved by Melissa Madison
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Opportunities Revisited
~ by OneMoreOption
If you’re like me, you’ve had excellent opportunities in reach, but you have not recognized them. At other times, you were aware of an opportunity, but you declined the invitation.
Many of us miss out on excellent opportunities.
It’s probably not possible to correctly assess the value of each opportunity.
Questions of “What if?” exist in every personal narrative. I don’t know how it could be possible for a person to not see the merits of some roads not taken.
I suspect many people never recognize how close they were to life-changing opportunities. If only they’d turned their head. If only they’d gone to the social event. If only they’d more closely listened to what someone else was saying or showing. If only they’d been kind instead of inconsiderate. If only they’d stayed to talk instead of running to the next unimportant thing.
I hear people tell their stories, and often they’ll make some incidental comment like: “And she offered me a job. So, I moved and lived there for 12 years.” 12 years?! That’s a huge portion of someone’s life that seemingly pivots on such an incidental event.
Much of the time, wisdom is not shown by being so smart you never misread an opportunity within your field of view.
Rather, wisdom is achieved by: 1) recognizing you did not initially evaluate opportunities correctly, 2) conceding your errors, and 3) pursuing the opportunities that remain.
I too often talk with people who, in telling me their personal history, speculate: “If only I had . . .” I often think these people are probably not seeing excellent opportunities that still remain near them.
Don’t kick yourself for what you did not accurately assess. Rather, put your efforts into improving your current assessments.
Use your hindsight to admit mistakes. Use humility to find and connect to what remains.
One of the keys to discovering and making the most of an opportunity is to focus on connecting more than competing.
I hope you’re a great competitor – in the rare social circumstances where competing should be your focus.
But more often in social behavior, finding the way to connect and cooperate will get you invited into the car rides with the people with whom you’d like to travel and revisit.
Sometimes, “survival of the fittest” is a harmful distraction. Over time, people who are intelligently kind may do better socially than those who try to “outdo” those around them.
In love and sexuality, you’ll likely create less through trying to outcompete and more through trying to find connections.
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For regular readers: Thank you for the Facebook “Like”.
I don’t know if these posts look like they take much work, but they take me hours. The next post will likely be Monday – as I try to create pleasant and more-thorough-than-most formats for new post series – and as I spend hours in the romantic search for favorites.
I hope you’ll join me this weekend in adoring the people close to you and telling them how much you love being a part of their lives every single day. I hope you’ll find physical and cognitive sensory pleasures to fully indulge in.
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