One Word Prompts

The exercise from WordPress asked me to choose a word. There were only six words, but my word stood out like a beam of light.
Choice.
That is my word.
Choice takes me back to the preverbial forks from my past.
When I could have gone left, or right or forged my own path, maybe backwards or straight or simply staying right in the center and looking ahead.
Choice.
I remember the only job I left almost before it started as a banquet waitress. It was like the employees gave me a test and said, here, clean this candelabra. It was covered with drips of countless candles from hundreds of events past. One of the senior banquet waitresses, you know the type, been doing it for her whole life, stout, bossy, matter of fact and in love with her role as senior banquet waitress had given the order.
I was about twenty one and had never had to clean a candleabra in my short life so I began chipping away not knowing that if I had simply put it in the freezer, the whole project would have taken less than thirty minutes. But there I stood in my little white button down with the black pants and black shoes chipping endlessly waht seemed like hours and impatiently away.
The whole reason I was even working at this job was because I had been fired from my previous one, the only time I had ever been fired in my life. Because I did something unworthy and embarrassing, because I made a stupid choice to add a ten dollar tip to a bill when a customer failed to acknowledge my brilliance as his waitress. This choice, of course and completely appropriately, prompted an abrubt firing and subsequently found me jobless. This banquet waitressing job was the only employment I could muster up after the foolish choice I had made. To even write this aloud for the world to read makes me cringe at my stupidity, but truth be told, it was a most painful lesson and to write it at least lets the ghost out that has been hiding in my closet for the last thirty years.
I stood there while the seasoned and older workers were likely snickering at my slowness and lack of knowledge about the freezer alternative. All of a sudden as if by magic, this thought occurred to me- I don’t have to do this. I had a choice. At twenty-one, I realized somehow that I had a choice in my happiness. I don’t know where this source of power came from, but gratefully it did. For the rest of my life, though I wasn’t evolved enough to realize this at the time, I would never work at a job unless I totally loved it. This was a deep thought for a young woman who didn’t seem to have many choices in front of her as far as job prospects went. But I did. I looked around at my future colleagues and took my sassy over confident self, walked up to the head banquet waitress and said, “I can’t do this. I am leaving.” With that I flipped my hair and marched out, my choice carried with me for the rest of my employed life.
Now some of you may be thinking, this is so irresponsible. You should finish what you started at least finish the shift. Fuck that. I was beyond miserable, there was no team work, that group was hoping I would fail. I could feel it and what was the point? For some reason, maybe it was my higher power, I was transported to the realization that LIFE WAS SHORT and there was no time for misery. As a result I ended up with a super fun job as a cocktail waitress grateful someone would choose to give me a second chance.
Choice is around us. Maybe this notion of choice is simply whether you think you have one or not. Maybe it is based on where you come from and how you think about the life in front of you. What I do know about this example though is that choosing happiness as my guide whenever possible has never let me down. Even in the bad choices, good has come out of it becasue of the lessons learned. Lessons learned were also choices. Choices because I chose to learn from them rather than repeating the same mistake again.
I know as I write this today that I am speaking from my perch of living in a free country where choice seems like a right. I know that I am not choosing life over death situations simply because I am fortunate in my geography. But for those of us who do have the privilege to live in a free society, looking at your life on a daily basis as one that you get to choose where it heads, can make the difference in the life you lead.
How we choose to look at our lives is surely choice and this quote that I refer to often in my writing sums it up in a neat little package. How do you choose to live? Does it feed you and make you happy? If not, then when?

As you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.
– wayne dyer.