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.

23 year old Derian King was returning from a party one evening . A snowstorm blanketed chilly Chicago that evening and road plows had only cleared the major roads so far.

At 1 AM in the morning, she stopped at a traffic light. A voice inside of her told her to turn left at the signal. She couldn’t figure out why she would be thinking such a thing since that was not the way to go home. Home was straight ahead. And she wanted to get home just as fast as possible.

At first, she ignored the voice. In an unemotional, matter of fact manner, the voice kept repeating “Turn left at the signal.” This just didn’t make any sense to Derian. The signal seemed to stay red for a long time while she battled back and forth between just taking her normal way home and turning left for no reason at all. Then she began to feel hunger pains.

Ah hah, she thought, there was a 24 hour chicken restaurant down the road if she turned left so she figured that was what the voice was about. She decided to turn left at the signal and get some chicken.

A short ways down the road she saw a car that had plowed into a snow bank. There was a man and woman standing outside the car and the woman was holding a baby. Derian stopped. They didn’t have a working phone to call anyone. The couple had kept the car running so they would have heat to protect the baby but now the car had run out of gas. It was very cold and there was no one around to help. They had been praying for someone to come along and assist them.

Derian called a tow truck and had them stay in her car to keep warm until the car could be taken care of. Then she drove them home.

So where did the voice and the hunger pains come from? Why did the light stay red for so long? Some people, upon hearing this story, immediately think that maybe ESP is at work here. Could Derian have picked up this couple’s message or energy or something and translated it in her own way?

Whether you believe in ESP or not, the facts don’t seem to support this theory. Notice that the voice she heard wasn’t one filled with worry or concern. It gave no indication of danger, emergency or other feelings that would typically come from a couple in such a situation. The voice spoke in a matter of fact way which gave no indication that anything was wrong. It just told her to turn left without any emotion at all.

These facts tend to support the notion that the voice came from someplace else other than the couple. So whom or what was observing this couple in trouble and told Derian to “Turn left at the signal?” Is someone upstairs watching over us if we would only listen? And if we don’t act on the voice, does it cause other things to occur such as hunger pains to help us make the right choice?

Like Derian shared her story, share your own story

If you’ve ever listened to your inner voice or feelings to make a choice, please share your story on this website. I am collecting 1000’s of stories just like Derian’s for the book I am writing “Life Is A Fork In The Road.” Your story is important because it will add something unique from all the rest. What I learn from all these stories added together may help us better understand how we can make better choices in the future and learn more about how the universe works.

If you strip it down to its very core, life is about making choices. Our life is filled with millions of choices big and small. Imagine a tree the size of our solar system with branches leading to branches and more branches. Each of those branches represents a fork we took, a choice we made. The path of all those forks combined IS your life.

If you never made a choice, you would have to stay in one place without moving, changing your clothes, eating or doing anything else. Getting out of bed is a choice. Brushing your teeth is a choice. Talking to someone is a choice. Stating your opinion is a choice. Getting in a car is a choice. Apologizing is a choice. Reading the newspaper is a choice. Looking at someone is a choice. Going to work is a choice. Thinking about something is a choice. Life involves thousands of choices every day some of which we do automatically as habit. Life IS a fork in the road.

Change one tiny choice and you change your day, maybe your entire life. Imagine this possibility. What happens if you changed your morning routine one day and by doing so delayed getting in your car to drive to work by 10 minutes? If you had kept to your routine, you would have been on the road 10 minutes earlier and might have been seriously hurt or killed in an accident that occurred on your normal route. What lead you to change your routine? Nothing happens by chance. There are no coincidences in life.

Whether you avoided something serious like an accident or just avoided having to talk with an overly chatty neighbor, have you ever made a tiny choice that resulted in a surprising outcome? Share your story here.

Life IS a fork in the road.

Don sitting in a client's boardroom overlooking the nation's Capital

(This post originally was a comment posted about a blog on www.savvysassymoms.com)

No one else can tell you what you should be doing with your life. You are the expert on you. The trick is getting beyond all the logic and analysis which needs to be done so you can finally hear your inner voice. Picking the right Fork In The Road often comes down to feeding your inner self with enough information and then knowing when your inner wisdom has figured it all out.

Great career choices come down to doing what you are passionate about and have a talent for. The passion drives you and the talent insures you can do it well. Here are some simple steps that can help you wade through your options and give your inner wisdom the information it needs to guide you.

1. Passion What would you do even if you weren’t paid to do it? Make a list of all those things. Sometimes, it isn’t any one thing on the list but the pattern of seeing many things on the list that can open your eyes.

2. Talent List all the things you are really, really good at. That’s not just about what you have done on the job. If you are a homemaker, you have to be great at many task. Almost all of them translate into skills that can be used to make money. If you are over forty, you already have a Ph.d. in making things work in the real world! It’s important that you choose something where you have a lot of talent. Otherwise you could pick something you love but you might not be very good at.

3. What are you bad at or hate doing? Yes, you need to make this list too. No career is perfect. You are going to have to do some things you are not good at and some things you dislike. Make sure those represent less than 20% of all the task and time involved in your career choice. Try to get it down to 10%. Otherwise you are likely to lose motivation over time and not accomplish as much as you wanted to.

Ultimately, the best choice for you won’t come from your analysis of these lists. They start your mental and spiritual juices flowing. The real answer will be worked out behind the scenes in your unconscious (and from above).

Don’t rush this. Don’t force it. Be patient and wait for a sign, an inner voice or a feeling that suddenly feels right at a very deep level. Confusion, frustration, cloudiness, uncertainty, anxiety and all the rest will just vanish to be replaced by a calm, peaceful, radiant knowing. You will feel it down to the core of your being. Now go for it! That is the right Fork In The Road for you.

If you’ve ever listened to your inner voice or feelings to make a choice, please share your story on this website. I am collecting 1000’s of stories for the book I am writing “Life Is A Fork In The Road.” Your story is important because it will add something unique from all the rest. What I learn from all these stories added together may help us better understand how we can make better choices in the future and learn more about how the universe works.