THE POINT OF NO RETURN
Reversable decisions are easy for they can be changed. What if a decision cannot be undone?
Some decisions imply going into a complete uncertainty. Without realizing what will happen next. Without knowing if we will win or lose. There are two options: staying where we are, this is safe, risk-free and comfortable, or moving into the unknown.
What if we do not like our comfortable? And we just stay there because the fear of unknown is bigger than staying where we do not like to be. We may not like the comfortable we live in, still it is familiar, we know what to expect, we have a map of that terrain. The new, the unknown is an unchartered territory, maybe we will like it maybe we won’t. The fear arises to warn and protect us from potential danger.
The key is right before the point of no-return. It makes us face who we truly are. The options are pretty straightforward: we either go back or we jump into the unknown. What makes us choose the latter? Sometimes the familiar and the comfortable becomes so unbearable that we’d rather jump. Sometimes potential future regret “I should have done it, I should have tried it” takes precedence. Very few people can simply override the fear, overstep it, or act despite it. The latter scenario often seems irrational and illogical, that is not to say impossible.
When we go back to the comfortable and known, it does not always make us happy. Sometimes it simply does not feel right to be back and say to ourselves that next time we will move forward, at a better time, in the future.
Sometimes the usual comfortable and known becomes not just linked to us, it becomes a part of us. Then stepping outside sounds like a betrayal or even a crime, in a sense. Crime against what we love, against ourselves. Once, through pain, we still detach from something, we feel liberated, as if we are regaining a part of ourselves that we had been missing. It is like borrowing a part of yourself to someone else for a while and then having it back.
What does it take to pass the point of no return? Should we always pass it?
Each scenario with a point of no return in it does not necessarily have to be treated as a test, as a pass/fail.
It is rather an invitation to learn something new about ourselves, about who we are. Each return to the comfortable and known makes us understand ourselves better an many levels. Sometimes leaving something behind is an incremental process, sometimes it is instantaneous. We define the structure of letting go. Embracing the pain is not always what we choose to do.
It is not even about taking a right decision or not making a mistake, it is not even about the right choice.
It is about bravery to make a decision, any decision, and bravery to stand by ourselves after that decision is made, whatever the choice was. Without judging ourselves, without comparing, without punishing, without giving ourselves a false hope that next time it will be different. Or it will not?