So Many Decisions

One of the young people I talk to regularly in The Fellowship is a woman whose father was never a presence in her life.  And to make bad matters worse, he's currently homeless and drug-addicted.  Her aunt is in touch with him periodically so she gets general updates but not much more than that.  She's a pretty fierce person and has slotted her father into a safe slot - she doesn't talk about him and is relatively comfortable with the status quo.  What are you going to do, right?  People make decisions that affect us and that's their right, even when the decisions are selfish and harm us.  The world can be a bitch.  All of us deserve a loving family and a safe place to live and enough to eat but not all of us are going to get all of those things.  We can deal with it or we can bitch and whine and complain and change absolutely nothing.

She got a message from her aunt that her father had a gift for her.  Given her past experiences she was sure that it would come to naught but - lo and behold! - her aunt stopped by with $2,000, all in twenties, most of the bills soiled and well-worn.  I spoke with her about this, miraculously refraining from telling her what to do -  who better than me to run your life, right?  given my skills in having successfully navigating the ups and downs of my world - while tossing out different suggestions about how she might respond.  My closest A.A. friends do this with me.  From time to time and more often than I'd expect they'll come up with a suggestion that is perfect for the situation, one that I simply hadn't thought of.  Often I'll end up doing something that had already occurred to me but every now and then I'll say "Huh.  That's perfect.  That's perfect" and I'll go that route.  Ultimately, we all need to find our own way and make decisions based on our own knowledge and intuition.  There's very rarely a perfectly right way or a perfectly wrong way.  If she had said she was going to keep the money and send her dad a letter telling him to fuck off I would have chimed in as that would have been pretty obviously a bad action but - other than that kind of egregious behavior - the decision is not mine.

She ended up keeping the money.  I think this is a great, great decision, one that honors her father and his efforts.  For him to collect that much money and keep it secure in an unsecured environment was quiet an accomplishment, quite an effort, and she honored him by accepting the gift.  One of the weirder and more difficult skills I had to learn was accepting a compliment graciously.  When I pass something along to a friend or loved one I'd rather not hear: "Oh, you don't have to do that."  No shit I don't have to do that.   I'm doing that because I want to do it.

Lot of wisdom in that decision.  I'm guessing she's second-guessing the decision but that's what we do.  And who knows how it plays out?  Sometimes I make what I think is the right and most appropriate decision and down the road it doesn't make things better.   All I can do is the best I can do at the time with the skills and information I have at hand.  All I can do is take what I think is the next Right Action and then see what God has in store for me and everyone else.