Are your daily decisions giving you the results you want out of life?

By David McElroy · October 7, 2011

Most of the people I know aren’t happy. They put on brave faces and try to fit in, but in their hearts, they’re hurting — because their lives aren’t what they wanted them to be. Why do people live this way?

I’m thinking about this because of someone I met earlier this week. Her story reminded me of something from the personal life of Steve Jobs, but I’ll get to that in a moment. This woman is a teacher who lives in a nice suburban house and loves her two beautiful young children. Her attorney husband provides nicely for the family and treats her well. But she’s miserable when she’s honest, as she was with me Monday night.

What she doesn’t tell most people is that she’s in love with another man and she says she always will be. He loved her, too, and wanted to marry her a decade ago, but he lived in England and was going home after working in this country for a year. He was an architect and he had his own practice back home. He begged her to come with him, but she didn’t want to leave what she already had here.

So she said “goodbye” to him for the last time at the airport and they both promised to always love each other. In the meantime, she’s started raising two children with a man who provides well for her, but who can’t give her what she really needs inside. Just a couple of months ago, the English architect married, too. She says the new woman looks a lot like her. She says she hopes they’re happy, but her voice sounds hollow when she says it.

Her story reminds me of one from the life of Steve Jobs. It probably just comes to mind easily because of his death this week. In 1990, Jobs was speaking to a graduate business class at Stanford University. One of the grad students he met that night was Laurene Powell, an intelligent young Wharton graduate. They had exchanged phone numbers, but Jobs had a business dinner that night, so he left to get into his car. Jobs later said:

”I was in the parking lot, with the key in the car, and I thought to myself, If this is my last night on Earth, would I rather spend it at a business meeting or with this woman? I ran across the parking lot, asked her if she’d have dinner with me. She said yes, we walked into town and we’ve been together ever since.”

The contrast between the choices couldn’t be any more stark. One person was afraid to do whatever it took to find the happiness she wanted. The other was willing to take a risk — and ditch what other people thought was more important — to follow what his heart told him was right.

In my own life, I’ve sometimes done one and sometimes done the other. When I’ve followed my heart, I’ve generally been happy with the risks I’ve taken, even if they didn’t end up exactly as I wanted. When I’ve ignored what my heart told me, it’s led to misery for me — a misery that leads to reliving certain moments and wishing I had had to courage to overcome my fears and follow what my heart told me was right.

What about you? Are you happy with your life? Are your daily decisions bringing you what you want? If you’re not joyful about experiencing life, you’re doing something wrong. Even if you’re a fellow Christian who believes that this life can’t compare to the joy of experiencing God in the afterlife, He put us here to learn — and the Bible is full of evidence that we’re to be joyful.

Are you at the airport waving goodbye to what you really want? Are you sitting in your car with your hands on car keys, ready to start your car and take you in the direction everyone else thinks you should go? You face those choices every day. It’s your choice whether you let love and joy fly away from you or whether you flout popular wisdom and go back to ask the girl to go with you right now.

It’s your choice. No one else can make it for you. Whichever choice you make, you will live with the consequences for the rest of your life. Choose joy. Follow your heart.

Note: If you’d like to see the full-size version of the beautiful artwork above, check it out here. It’s no longer available, but it was a card someone was selling at Etsy.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts