The Life Is A Fork In The Road page has been on Facebook for 18 months. During that time it has grown to over 21,000 people from 155 countries around the world. Facebook has provided me with information about the top twenty countries and cities that everyone on the page comes from. The results are a bit surprising.

We come from everywhere!

I come from the United States and write in English. So, yes, there are more people on the page from the United States than any other country. No surprises there. It would seem logical that English speaking countries would dominate the top of the list followed by other countries. But that is not the case. The city list is even more surprising because the one city that more people on the page come from than any other is not in the United States is not an English speaking country.

What follows is the list of the top twenty countries and cities represented on this page in order from highest to lowest.  One of the most interesting findings when looking at the country list is that some countries with very small populations are in the top twenty and even rank higher than other more populated countries. I have no idea why the Life Is A Fork In The Road page is much more popular in certain countries than others.

Top 20 countries represented on the Life Is A Fork In The Road Facebook page:

United States

India

Indonesia

United Kingdom

Canada

South Africa

Philippines

Portugal

Australia

Serbia

Thailand

Albania

Croatia

Macedonia

Italy

Sri Lanka

Pakistan

Malaysia

Ireland

Top 20 cities represented on the Life Is A Fork In The Road Facebook page:

Jakarta

Atlanta

New York

Chicago

Los Angeles

Dallas

Lisbon

Livingston

New Delhi

Seattle

Tampa

Makati

Phoenix

Mumbai

Philadelphia

Houston

Miami

Denver

Delhi

At least once a week and sometimes more, I’ve posted a status update on the Life Is A Fork In The Road Facebook Page since January. These updates were initially intended to encourage discussion about listening to and following our inner wisdom. As I read more stories and insights, I began to learn things that shaped these weekly reflections. Sometimes it was a deeper insight about what was really going on in people’s lives. Other times I found several people commenting about the same issue and turned that into a post so others could comment on it.

Writing Life Is A Fork In The Road

This book I’m writing is not going to be a collection of stories though it will include many stories to illustrate its ideas.  It will be a conceptual book about what I’ve learned and the conclusions I’ve drawn. The stories and insights everyone shares all have become a part of a collective body of knowledge. From that I look for patterns that pinpoint what we have in common and what is unique to each of us. This pattern analysis will ultimately allow me to discover deeper truths about our inner wisdom, what it is, how we hear it, what keeps us from hearing it, and how we learn to trust it. It is my hope that the final conclusions of my book will help people to find their own inner wisdom and trust it enough to follow it more often.

What follows are 25 of those weekly Facebook status updates in sequential order. If you read them in that order, you will notice an evolution in my thoughts. That evolution reflects what I’ve learned by reading all your stories and insights during this last nine months. This book is literally being written one post and comment at a time. While the status updates are short and therefore not representative of all I need to say on a particular point, the longer comments I have made in answer to many people’s questions all reflect the conclusions I’m drawing and will become a part of the final book as well.

If you feel like copying and sharing any of these, please remember to give Don Shapiro credit as the author along with a link to either this website or the Facebook page for the book. Gratitude and blessings to all of you.

http://www.lifeisaforkintheroad.com

http//www.facebook.com/lifeisaforkintheroad

25 Facebook Status Updates from the Life Is A Fork In The Road Page

Our inner voice can be as unique as we are. For some it is a soft whisper, others a shout, and many some type of inner feeling. To some it might be an illness or someone shouting at them or an event that happened to them. While many of you have talked about who or what you feel the inner voice is, what we need to explore more is the different ways it manifest itself & why it shows up differently in different people.

How can we make our lives better? How can we make better choices? How can we find peace, happiness and a good life? There are 6.8 billion people on this planet so there are 6.8 billion answers to these questions. We can’t live someone else’s life or by someone’s else’s advice. We each have our own unique journey. That’s why listening to our inner voice is so important. It’s the only advice that really matters.

We’re a miracle born without an instruction manual. It appears we actually have a built in guidance system some of us learn how to use through experience. Even then, we’re still novices in how it all works. By collecting enough stories about real life experiences that involve our inner voice, it’s my hope we might actually learn something new so we can better use this miracle we’ve been given.

Life is a test of faith. No matter how many facts or analysis exist about the fork we face, there always remains something unknown. Ultimately, we have to make a leap of faith concerning many of our choices. At that moment, do we hear & follow the guidance from our inner voice of wisdom whether it comes from within us or a symbolic event around us?

Our choices & experiences may be great teachers, but do we always learn the lesson that was meant for us? What role does our attitude & perspective play in whether we learn anything from experiences placed there to help us grow? Do we sometimes fail to learn the lesson? Have any of you failed to learn a lesson from a choice only to have one fork after another thrust upon you to get you to wake up to that lesson?

What is our true inner voice? Some say it is God. Some say it is the universe. Some say it is the accumulated wisdom from our life experiences. Some say it is all of this. How does it differ from our wants, desires, likes, dislikes, emotions and ego? Do we have a destiny guided by our inner voice that we either follow or fight which shapes our life? How do we explain when bad things happen to us beyond our control?

Life IS a fork in the road…actually over 1,000,000 forks during our lifetime. Add up your choices & that’s your life. Change your choices & change your life. Some are big, many are small & more involve daily routines we put on auto pilot. Our inner voice may tell us to change any of these choices, even the order of our morning routine or daily drive. Following our inner voice is about all these choices big & small.

Awareness unlocks our potential. As our awareness grows so we grow. If we’re looking for guidance to move beyond where we are at, maybe we need to expand our awareness about ourselves, our situation and more. As our awareness expands, it changes what we see and how we see it. It opens up windows and doors that didn’t exist before. That may help us unlock new inner guidance & discover new forks we hadn’t considered.

We are not alone. No matter what we have experienced or what paths we followed, through all that has been shared on this page we have learned that we are not the only ones. No matter what life throws at us others have been there before us. We are all connected to each other and connected to something bigger than ourselves. Together, as a community, we have become a giant hope generating factory.

How do we deal with the fear that holds us back from making a choice at a major fork in the road? Is it fear of making the wrong choice? Is it fear of the unknown? Is it fear of leaving one’s comfort zone? Is it fear of things being less than perfect? Sometimes, it might be any or all of these. Sometimes we don’t trust ourselves. Sometimes we don’t trust our inner voice even when we know it speaks the truth.

Life is learning to trust the soft whisper deep inside us that hides between our breaths. It might not always be soft & sometimes it can come in unusual ways such as an illness, the passing of a loved one, a movie a friend ask you to watch, a dream, a poem or something someone says to you. However it appears, it hides between all the other voices and feelings inside of us such as our wants, desires, likes & ego.

Does our community offer a glimpse of how the world can get along peacefully? We now have members from over 155 countries. They represent every religion, spiritual belief & philosophy on earth. We are living proof it can be done. When we build from a foundation of what we have in common, it’s so much easier to work through our differences with respect. Our community has made the world a much smaller & more personal place.

Don’t let the experiences of the past limit your vision for the future. We have to learn how to find our true inner voice of wisdom from all the other voices inside of us. A voice from the past may keep telling us we can’t be more than we have been. Sometimes, our well meaning family & friends say the same thing. Let your true inner voice give you the courage to pursue your purpose and be all you can be.

One of our greatest challenges is learning to trust ourselves. When our true inner voice of wisdom sends us a message, are we listening for it & do we trust it enough to act on it? How do we know for sure which voice or feeling is the real one especially when other voices are competing with it? What if we don’t like what it’s advising us to do? How can we learn to trust it at that crucial fork in the road?

Life is a journey, not a destination. Everything we experience offers kernels of wisdom to guide us along that journey. It’s not where we arrive that counts but how we live every moment along the way. Following our true inner voice of wisdom can lead us to experiences we otherwise wouldn’t have encountered & enrich our life in surprising ways.

A “den of chatter” buzzes inside us battling against our true inner voice of wisdom. We can get used to a certain way of being such as our feelings pulling, pushing & disturbing us until that becomes our “normal” accepted way of life. It can be hard to leave the familiar, even a dysfunctional familiar, for a new way of making choices. How do we move from following our head & emotions to following our heart?

Everything we experience offers kernels of wisdom to guide our journey through life. From one fork to another, life offers a never ending stream of lessons. Even choices that turned out poorly serve a purpose. There are no bad choices. Our challenge is learning the lessons from those choices that will help us make better choices in the future & recognize our true inner voice of wisdom when it beckons.

Love is unconditional. It is a spiritual state, not an emotion. It’s not a choice you pick at a fork in the road. Once love enters you, it exists forever. Your choice is whether you want someone you love to be in your life. If someone you love does something you absolutely hate, you may not want them around you but you still love them. If you place any conditions on your love, what you are feeling is not love at all.

We are the light at the end of the tunnel. For some, the tunnel is longer than for others. We may look all around & ask advice from others to help us out of that tunnel. The real answers that can help guide our journey come from within us, deep within. The light shines from the core of our existence, a place beyond our emotions, personality and ego. That light is our true inner voice of wisdom.

The rhythm of the universe flows through us & connects us all. If you listen closely, you can hear its beat. That beat of wisdom from within & beyond is unique to each of us. One person’s quiet is another’s shout. One person needs the absence of stress while another needs the pressure. Beyond our uniqueness, there lies a common pattern that unites us all. This is what your stories have taught me so far.

No one knows better than you what’s best for you. You are the expert on you. Of course we receive advice from family, friends and even an occasional stranger. Some of it might open our eyes to a new perspective but ultimately we have to make the choice that’s right for us. Other people’s choices may be perfect for them but not so much for us. You can’t live someone else’s life or by someone else’s advice.

Is following our inner voice of wisdom a selfish act? Is it just “doing our thing”? How do we reconcile guidance from within & beyond us (be it the Creator or other force depending on your beliefs) versus putting our loved ones first? The inner voice of wisdom is not our ego, desires or emotions that may lead us to selfish choices. It’s a message of wisdom that considers the best interest of both us & our loved ones.

Every choice contains seeds of a lesson that can improve our choices in the future. There are no bad choices. Even choices that turned out awful can teach us to listen to the inner voice of wisdom we ignored. If that’s the only lesson we learned, then the experience was worthwhile. It’s not whether a choice turns out good or bad that matters. It’s whether we learned something from it that helped us to keep growing.

Our true inner wisdom guides us toward what we need, not what we want. It reflects knowledge, logic & understanding about us & our journey that goes beyond our conscious awareness. It knows what we need to learn & experience to prepare us for the next part of our journey. Trusting & following this guidance may mean doing something that initially is unpleasant but essential for us to arrive at a better place.

Our inner wisdom broadcast deep inside us just like a radio station. You have to tune into its frequency to hear the message. Your radio has dozens of stations all broadcasting messages that sound like a “den of chatter”. Too often we keep our dial tuned to just a few stations instead of using the scan button to hear a sample from all the stations. The more you scan, the more likely you are to find your inner voice.

Copyright 2010 Don Shapiro     All rights reserved.  These statements were all written by Don Shapiro and  posted on the Life Is A Fork In The Road Facebook Page between January and September, 2010.

A post I made about unconditional love on the “Life Is A Fork In The Road” Facebook page has raised the question about whether humans are capable of true unconditional love. Here is how it began: “Love is unconditional. It is a spiritual state, not an emotion. It’s not a choice you pick at a fork in the road….it exists forever.” Is this just an ideal we strive for but can never attain or is it possible for a human to actually love someone unconditionally, love them even if they do something we hate or they decide to leave us?

When someone leaves you, do you still love them?

The human condition is affected by all types of pushes and pulls from our emotions, upbringing, personality, temperament, ego and experiences. This makes us who we are and it also makes us imperfect and fallible. Of course, that’s what makes life interesting. Can we rise above all this and actually love someone unconditionally? The post I made was not just something I pulled from the sky because it sounded nice. It was based on my own personal experiences and observations. Now, for the first time since I started collecting stories from others eight months ago, I am going to share an inner voice experience of my own that first awakened me to what true unconditional love means. This is a real life love story on many levels.

The year is 1986. After being happily married for 11 years, my wife suddenly and without warning told me she was divorcing me to go back to a man she had dated before we met. There were no obvious problems in our relationship. No arguments. Nothing was going on to indicate any trouble brewing. Even after she told me this, she never said there was anything wrong with us. She just said that she had come to realize she loved this other guy in a way she didn’t love me and that’s all it was about. Two days after she told me this, she moved into an apartment. The guy left his wife of 25 years that same day and moved in with her. They got married within the year and are still together.

Hearing this completely out of the blue crushed me. It was like I was run over by a steam roller. I have never before nor ever sense felt pain like that. I had imagined we would spend the rest of our life together. I didn’t want anyone else. I loved this woman with all my heart. There is no way to describe the hurt and pain I felt. It was like every cell in my body was being torn apart and run through a food processor.

Yet, within hours of hearing this something else from deep within me spoke loud and clear. This was my true inner voice of wisdom. I still loved this woman as much as I had before she broke the news. I still wanted her to be happy. I still cared about her. If she would be more happy with someone else rather than me, that was her choice. I realized at that moment that if you truly love someone, you want them to be happy, you want the best for them even if that means not being with you.

This realization did not make the pain and hurt go away. It was so severe and intense that it took me over three years to finally get back to being me. All my friends told me she was no good and would say unkind things about her. They thought that would make me feel better. They simply didn’t understand. The way I saw it, how can someone go from loving someone to not loving them overnight just because they did something you didn’t want. That would negate the previous 11 years as if they never existed.

A couple months after she left, I did a very strange thing which was the next step in helping me move forward with my life. Once again, my inner voice of wisdom came through loud and clear. Suddenly, I started thinking about this guy she went back to and how he must be feeling. I literally began to look at this through his eyes instead of mine. That inspired me to write the lyrics to a love song written from his point of view.

Ticking

Lyrics by Don Shapiro

Courtesy of Rykristo Music Pubishing

You told me we were through

It was what we had to do

We made our beds before we met

When our love’s fate was set

Our homes blazing oh so bright

With anger and more in plain sight

So we sought solace as one

Embraced away hurt on the run

(chorus)

It wasn’t right

Oh, no

It wasn’t right

To fly away in the night

To believe we could unite

So you hid our love

Deep inside of you

Tucked away from view

Ticking

Just ticking

Ticking for too many years

Ticking through a thousand tears

You locked your love far away

Deep in memory so they say

We became friends for many years

Saying hi without any tears

The years have taken flight

Family chains wrapped so tight

As our seedlings grew up, oh wow

You’ve come back for my love no

(chorus repeats)

(bridge to finale)

You couldn’t keep your love locked away

Just ticking til judgment day

So you threw away that old bed

And came back to me like they said

How was I able to still consider her happiness as being of paramount importance after what she had done? How could I go through the most devastating pain and hurt imaginable without having any ill feelings toward her? How could I possibly write a song lyric that was a love song written from the other guy’s point of view? There is one and only one answer to these questions. I loved this woman unconditionally regardless of what she did. I am living proof that it is possible for a human being to love unconditionally.

It’s one thing to wax philosophically about what we believe is and is not possible concerning the human condition until we are thrown into the fire and discover how we respond in the moment. I wasn’t thinking about the meaning of love or the concept of unconditional love before this happened. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before so I was not prepared for it. Maybe we never are. If you had asked me a year earlier what I would do under such a circumstance, I’m sure my answer would have been different than what I actually did. How I responded to this situation came from deep within my heart and it was as real as it gets. My reaction surprised me and inspired me.

Since then, I have given a lot of thought to the meaning of love versus how the word is thrown around all too easily. From this experience, I came to learn what true love means. The test of true love, unconditional love is this: would you still love the person even if they did something awful or left you for another? Would you still care about them and want the best for them? If you can answer that question yes, you love unconditionally. If you answer that question no, what you are feeling is not love. It may be a very strong emotion and feeling of attachment but it is not love

The state of true love occurs when the love that is inside of us aligns at a deep energy and frequency level with the love that is inside of someone else. This connection isn’t about desire, attraction, enjoyment, similar interest, common values or emotions. It is something that simply happens outside of human control. Once that internal love alignment occurs, it will last forever. It can never be broken. Our spirit is forever connected to the other person’s spirit regardless of what happens with us on a human level.

I honestly don’t know why some people have the capacity to love unconditionally and others do not. It is still a mystery to me why I was able to act and feel this way through such a nightmare. I have my doubts whether anyone could do this if they wanted to. From my experience, this was not a choice. It simply reflected the state of love that existed inside of me and my natural and normal response due to that state of love. It may be just fine for many people to exist in relationships based on strong emotional ties that they call love even though, in reality, it is not love at all. Unconditional love may sound like something wonderful but it appears we have no control over its occurrence though it would be something that I would hope all people would strive to find.

Relationships are conditional. True love is not. We can and will place all kinds of conditions on having a relationship with someone based on a laundry list of human issues. We may decide we don’t want someone in our life anymore, even one of our children if their behavior is too awful for us to handle. Most parents love their children unconditionally, even step children and ones they adopt. If we truly love, love unconditionally, then regardless of what someone does, we will still love them whether we want them in our life or not or whether they want us in their life or not. True love never dies. Love is a spiritual state, not an emotion.

Her boyfriend walks out on her after she was five months pregnant because of his drug addiction.

After separating from my husband, I met someone and started a new relationship. Our relationship progressed very quickly and I got pregnant after about 5 months. All of it came way too fast and stressed us both out. He slowly became despondent with me and took off more and more. We got into more fights and he would leave for days then come back and apologize. It wasn’t until much later after the baby was born that I learned he had a drug habit and all the stress sent him into a relapse. Three days before Christmas when I was seven months pregnant, he left me. He told me he was going to see some family out of town and never came back. He left me with $50 to my name and didn’t even call.

Luckily, I have amazing parents who had me stay with them for Christmas and really helped me out. My mother was my coach during delivery and they had me move in with them for extra support. Through the remainder of the pregnancy, I went from rage and anger to concern for him and an expectation that he would contact me. I called his sister’s house where I found he was living but I could never get him on the phone. There were times where I felt some momentary clarity. This was a test of my will and who I am. It was my job to forgive him even if he didn’t ask for it.

It was about a month before my son was born that I started getting an urge to find him so my son could have a father. I was discouraged by all my friends and family to do that and I listened. I was afraid that the stress could induce labor in a city away from my personal support circle so out of my son and my own safety, I didn’t go. But I kept thinking about this every day. After my son was born, I tried calling where I believed he was staying and spoke to some of his relatives to let them know he had a son – still I didn’t hear from him. I had my family saying to let it go. Eventually, I had to send out his birth certificate and I at first put no father on it but I couldn’t get myself to actually mail it out.

After my son turned one month old, I decided to go to London where he was staying (approx. 1.5 hours away) and introduce him to his son. My thoughts were that when my son grows up, I want to tell him that I tried doing the right thing and gave him the chance to meet his father. If he didn’t have a relationship with his father, it was not by my doing – out of any of my resentment or anger. I was compelled to do what was right for my son. This is where my inner voice would not let go of me. I had everyone in my family against me finding him or giving him any type of chance but I couldn’t ignore that insistent inner voice.

I called his sister who told me that if I met her at her house, she would give me directions to get to him. My family was extremely upset with me doing this and no one supported me on my decision. As soon as I saw him, his first words to me were “It wasn’t your fault, it was all mine.” and he told me the whole story about his drug addiction and relapse. Amazingly, the day my son was born was the same day he overdosed and actually flat lined in the hospital. When he woke up, it was also the day he sobered up.

We slowly started talking again. At first because I had so many questions about what happened, I would call to get answers. Eventually we became friends. It was such a painful time in my life with no one offering me any support at all concerning my decision to contact him. I felt a lot of guilt after my parents helped me out so much about going against their wishes. They hated him for everything he did and refused the concept of forgiveness. I remember sitting with a minister and talking to him about it and he advised me to just follow my heart and do what I believe is best.

It took a long time and a lot of counseling but I found a way to completely forgive him. I knew I had to and knew that everything I wanted to teach my children in life required me to be the living example of it. We first became friends, then best friends. When we both felt strong and whole again, we started dating. Now, we are engaged and through his loving actions to me and my children, my family forgave him too. We have a loving home and now, whenever stress comes in our lives, we use our past as a source of strength. We find ourselves saying to each other that if what we had to go through didn’t break us nothing will and we can battle anything together.

An inner guidance led me through everything I did. I had to go completely against the stream and just follow my heart about what I felt was right. I completely believe that being a moral person is not what you do when people are watching you but what you do when no one is or when everyone is telling you otherwise.

(The following story was submitted by Dan Allen, a member of the Fork In The Road Band in Logan, Iowa. They are a country rock band.  www.myspace.com/forkintheroad)

Fork In The Road Band

Fork in the Road has both a geographic and ironic meaning to us. The obvious one is that I actually live between the forks of two highways in Logan, Iowa. The locals call it “The Fork.” That’s where our band practices and writes music.

How we came to be a band involves a lot of fateful events, timing and locations. The guys in the band are all from the small town of Logan, Iowa. We went to high school together, played music, sports, and hung out a lot. Ryan Michael (bass player) and myself (Lead Guitar, vocals) have been playing together in bands since our early teens. We continued to play together throughout high school and college.

After college, we decided to try our talents in the Nashville music scene. We met up with high school friend Andy Makey (lead vocals/guitar) in Nashville. He was scheduled to be out of the Marines by the time we moved to there. That day came and we all were in our place. At first, it was great because we discovered we had similar taste in music. In high school, Andy was never a part of our band, but was an accomplished singer/actor in the school musicals. In the Marines, he picked up the acoustic guitar. We were impressed. This all had the makings of a great start for our band but it wasn’t meant to be.

After a fallout with another band member who wasn’t from Logan, the band split up and we went our separate ways. Andy moved to Northern California briefly as he was recalled to Marines when the Iraq war broke out. I moved back home with my tail between my legs and not a penny in my pocket.

Back in Logan, I played around with some local cover bands in the Omaha scene, nothing more than a little spending money. Andy was released from the Marines a few months later, and Ryan moved home from Nashville within two weeks of that. We reunited as friends at “The Fork” where we all shared stories about our experiences. At first, it was just great to get back together with my pals.

We really didn’t set out to play music again until we decided to have an “open jam” at one of the local bars. We invited all of our musician friends to come out and jam with us. After a couple of these sessions, we started to call the jams Fork in the Road productions. Soon after that, we knew the core of these jams had been established…we really were a band again.

Andy, Ryan, and I then set out to find a drummer. On New Year’s Eve 2004, Fork the Road  Band was born. We have since replaced our old drummer, who was not from Logan, with one who is. We are now an all Logan band. This last New Year’s Eve we celebrated 5 years of the Fork in the Road Band. It’s amazing how many forks we took that all lead us back to Logan and back into a band together.

When we set out to do this, we had to make the choice of sacrificing our lives yet again for music, or choosing the common direction of any stereotypical small town person. We’ll needless to say we feel we made the right decision!

How can we know when our choices are a justified risk versus just rolling the dice? We should never just choose to do something because we fear we might regret it later. At the same time, we have to find a way to overcome our natural fears about making risky choices.

Anyone who advances themselves whether moving up the career ladder as an employee or in their own business has to take risk. Anyone who succeeds in raising a family or stays married for a long time has to take risk. Successful people generally make the right choices over 80% of the time. So, yes, you are going to strike out sometimes in order to achieve anything meaningful. But, you need to learn how to take risk that turn out in your favor most of the time. How you make choices when faced with an uncertain outcome is the primary focus of my book research.

Let me offer four tips that can reduce the risk of the choices you make and improve your batting average:

1. Gather the maximum amount of information possible before you make any choices.

That includes ALL the facts that are available (not just the facts you liked the best), observations, readings on the subject, opinions of experts and respected colleagues and more. You reduce the risk substantially by knowing everything you can about the various choices you have.

From my experience, many bad choices could have been avoided had someone actually done their homework instead of rushing in on a whim. You need to be about 10 times more thorough in collecting information than you think will be necessary. Maximum thoroughness is the operative phrase for great choices.

2 All the information you gather gets fed into your subconscious mind where your choices can best be evaluated

That’s where 90% of your brain power resides. That’s where the greatest logical and analytical thinking occurs. You can’t figure it out your choices simply using your conscious thoughts which are quite limited. While you should do whatever you can with conscious thought, you need to allow this information to percolate in your subconscious for a while.

When you do this, you will get messages from inside yourself about which choices make more sense. Reflect on these messages carefully. Make sure they are coming from the right place and not from emotional feelings or desires. You may want something really bad. Be carefully that this desire is not influencing the conclusions your subconscious mind is delivering.

3. Pay very close attention to comparisons such as risk versus reward, advantages versus disadvantages, ease versus difficulty, etc.

Unless you have a list of the problems, weaknesses, cost and concerns of making a choice, you haven’t done your homework. Period. Successful choices are not just about thinking positively.

4. Really look yourself in the mirror and be honest about whether you have the skill, talent and knowledge to successfully handle these choices.

Maybe it will be a good choice for you after you have learned some new skills that are critical for the path you want to pursue. Maybe once you get those skills you will discover that the original choice isn’t so good and a much better one presents itself to you.

What I’ve learned is that going through these four steps allows the best choices to rise to the top and the rest to sink of their own weight.

How has a tiny choice changed your life?

In a typical day, we make over 200 choices which add up to over 10,000 choices a year. You may have put many of those choices on automatic pilot but they are choices that you could change if you wanted to. And each of those forks in the road has the potential to alter the course of your life.

At first, that might seem like an absurd thing to say. Until you really start thinking about it. Take some of the most basic things you do in the morning. First, you have a choice whether to get up or stay in bed. Now, staying in bed has consequence which is why you normally get out of bed whether you want to or not. But supposing you actually spent 10 minutes one morning pondering this before you got up. Now you are 10 minutes behind schedule. Let’s imagine that even with rushing you still are late for everything that day.

What affect could being 10 minutes late for everything have? You’d be on the road to your work or taking the kids to school 10 minutes later than normal. Maybe by doing so you missed an accident you would have been involved in otherwise. Or you discovered an opportunity you would have missed. Or you connected with an old friend you hadn’t seen in years. The list of possible changes is endless.

Take the same “what if” approach toward changing the order of your morning routine, forgetting to brush your teeth, changing what you eat in the morning or letting your kids go to school in mismatched clothes because your late. Each of these forks in the road blossoms into hundreds of new possibilities that didn’t exist if you had stayed on your auto pilot routine. And we’ve only talked about the first 90 minutes in the morning so far. Oh my.

Just imagine what might happen if you made different choices about ordinary things that occur throughout your day. Alter one task, shift when you do things by as little as a minute or say something to someone you know you’ve never said before and you may have started an avalanche of events that could touch your life for weeks, months or years.

When we think about our choices, we tend to focus on the obvious ones. Those things we actually took the time to seriously think out or something critical we had to respond to in the moment. Of course, those are choices too. And those choices can dramatically affect our little world.

Yet, a series of tiny choices often leads us down a path we had not intended or considered. Taken as a whole, those 50, 100 or more micro choices can actually produce one gigantic choice for us. Sometimes we don’t see where this is all taking us. Sometimes we can look back and feel that events outside of our control put us in this place. Or, perhaps, something unseen, deep inside of us or beyond us, led us to take longer than normal brushing our teeth that morning. Like a pebble thrown into a pond, these mirco choices can ripple out shaping major directions for our life and those around us.

When you ponder what affects the choices you make or how you could improve those choices in the future, look behind your logical and analytical decision making methods. Ask yourself if something is happening in your subconscious mind or from sources outside of yourself that might be guiding some of your choices. At the same time, reflect on situations where you have resisted these forces and what happened as a result.

Every year we face over 10,000 forks in the road. Whether through conscious choice or automatic conditioning, each of those choices shapes our future. And each of those choices is a story waiting to be told.

(Esmerelda is a fictitious name selected by the person who submitted this story so she remain anonymous.)

When I was 19, I married my high school boyfriend. At the time, it seemed like a wonderful idea even though my parents and his parents were a little trepidatious because we were so young. That decision was made out of what seemed like the obvious thing to do. I don’t remember any debate or internal voices.

Life got more complex over the next few years.

Fast forward to me at 28. We had separated once before at that point and it was happening again. We were not meant to be married and both of us had known it for many years. Whatever inner voice I had, I had smothered repeatedly in hopes that I could continue on my current path without having to go through any major upheaval even if I knew eventually it was coming.

When it did finally come and there was no way to get away from it, I more or less froze up. At the time, I was working very part time. I had some savings, but was afraid to get an apartment on my own in case I couldn’t pay my own rent. I was afraid to change everything I knew. I was afraid I would lose a lot of people by divorcing and separating from a family I had been a part of since I was in my teens. I was afraid of just about everything. Still at this point, if there was an inner voice, I couldn’t hear it. I curled up on the couch and went dormant for a bit (actually, I got mono so I didn’t have much of a choice).

My then husband was moving along anyway. He had a new girlfriend already and rather than getting mad at him, I was still just feeling more broken down and unable to make a change or move on. Things were getting to the point where I would have to make a decision, a series of decisions, about how to 1) Move, 2) Work and 3) Get over it.

The first step in the process was getting away. At first, I did not want to leave town, but then I decided to anyway. At that point, I began to take on a philosophy of doing the opposite of what my instincts told me to do. My instincts had led me into a situation where I knew I had been unhappy and did nothing about it for 10 years. So to hell with my instincts for a bit. Someone told me once that sometimes you have to let the universe hold you and so I did. I decided to take on a policy of saying yes to anything that would change me and have faith that what came my way was better for me than what I had.

Strangely, not much of what happened to me next had to do with my own decisions other than saying yes. I had been writing freelance for a website and was offered a full time job without even asking for it. I was offered a cheap place to live with someone I knew. I went to visit my mom and step dad and ended up being given a free vehicle (I needed one). Later, I went back to visit them so I could drive my free truck home and brought a friend along with me.

This friend asked me to drive through her home town on the way back, to which I said yes. She also decided on the drive up that she was going to fix me up with her cousin. Her cousin lived 800 miles away from me and I had never met him, but I told her to go for it. That decision came from a literal voice in my head that said “yes.” Her cousin and I met. We soon began to talk regularly on the phone, over email and visit each other. This last summer he moved to my area and we now live together.

In conclusion, I think we often make decisions based on fear or what seems like the most practical thing to do, but really we know what we often should do. We sometimes don’t want to do it or are afraid to do it, but if you can get rid of those feelings and get to the core of what you know is good for you, the world really does hold you and shuffle you along a path that will lead you to better and happier things.

In 2005, my step daughter Kristin and I engaged in a lengthy email exchange about a problem she was facing. She had written me a long email explaining what was going on. So I wrote her a long email back. Then she wrote me a long email in response. That led to another email from me.

By the time we got to the third round of these long emails, I was digging pretty deep inside myself for something that might be helpful. Kristin is a thinker. She analyzes everything and then analyzes her analysis. I guess I was trying to find a way to help her look at her situation through a fresh window.

I was halfway through my third long email typing at over 120 words a minute, just cruising along the writer’s highway, when out of nowhere I said “Kristin, life is a fork in the road…follow your head or follow your heart.”

While the rest of the thoughts expressed in those emails are long forgotten, the phrase “life is a fork in the road” took on a life of its own. It followed me around. More thoughts about its meaning crept into my awareness. So I started writing these ideas down.

This went on for over a year before it occurred to me that I was starting to write a book. Another year went by while I continued to jot ideas down. Around that time, I sold a condo I owned in Las Vegas to Derian King. One day while talking with her, I told her about my book idea. She is the first person outside of my family I had ever mentioned it to.

Derian’s eyes lighted up and she told me a story about how she saved a couple stranded in a snowstorm with their baby because a voice told her to turn left at the signal. That story was the first one shared on this website. Her reaction made me wonder if I was on to something.

After hearing Derian’s story, I got this nagging feeling I was missing something important about my book. It was a few months later when I realized that I needed to go out and collect other people’s “fork in the road” stories. Then I discovered I needed to collect enough stories to support the conclusions of the book. This meant a full scale research project so the results of all the stories collected could shape the book’s conclusions.

It took another couple of years before I was able to figure out the best way to conduct that research and move this project forward. Now “fork in the road” story collection is in full swing thanks to the reach of the internet. “Life Is A Fork In The Road” found me. Since then, I have been guided by an inner voice and serendipitous events to turn it into a book and research project. Every step this project has taken all illustrate the message of the book. We do seem to be guided by something beyond ourselves that knows the best paths for us to follow….if we would only listen!

Webs of Fear by Carolyn Jones

I fall into the category of hearing the voice, following where it took me, and discovering great beauty in myself and others. By following my bliss, I passed through the gates of my heart.

I am a photographer. Several years ago, I discovered a community filled with wrought-iron entry gates. I grew to love these gates and could not stop photographing them. That is the voice I listened to initially, the one that said to keep shooting them. Drawn to their beauty, they began to represent the ways in which my heart was closed – to myself, to others.

I kept photographing the gates and soon I had a collection, a series. I listened to the voice that said to name them, naming each gate using words from lists I had made. My lists included feelings, both positive and negative, principles of living, and ways to treat others and myself. The titles of the “Gates of the Heart” series can be found on my website at http://www.carolynjonesphotographs.com.

After naming these gates, I had an epiphany. One day in my journal, I wrote: “I have spent a lifetime spinning webs of terror and shame that stand as sentinels to my heart.” This was very powerful, as not three days before, I had named an image of spider’s web on a gate “Webs of Fear.” I realized that my journal entry described the image and its title.

I followed the fork searching through my journals for anything that could be used to match with a gate. With few exceptions, I found prose that paired with each image.

Then the voice told me to compile a book of the paired prose and photographs. The result has been “Opening the Gates of the Heart”, a book about my journey through the gates of despair to peace and joy. I am currently following the voice that is encouraging me to tell my story, and I am blogging my way through the book. You can follow along as I journey through the book at http://www.gatesoftheheart.wordpress.com.

Not only have I been willing to listen to that small voice that has progressively led to my book which I am told is filled with hope and inspiration, I have been able to heal, as I have gone through the gates of my own heart, as well.