(ThySistas.com) There are moments when you have to step back and appreciate your life and its journey. The moment when you take into account each and every event that has led you to your current state. You might look and see that you made a decision just to get by or to get it out of the way. Your heart was not in it and you did something that no one likes to do. You settled and lived with it. Funny how hindsight is the best teacher and reveals how sometimes we go along to get along.
It is not a bad thing that we do this. Some situations call for us to accept things as they are and settle because it would be more advantageous. Other times, settling is the path of least resistance and gives an easy route to what we want. No matter how you choose to look at it, you still went with the second option instead of the first. What matters now it’s how you choose to continue with your settled decision. This is when the situation gets tricky because emotions begin to weigh heavy on those decisions once the outcome comes into view. If the outcome was favorable, we afford ourselves grace and move on.
If it wasn’t, there tends to be a lingering feeling of disappointment and defeat left. These are the feelings that plague your mind and draw you deeper into a hole. Settling, at times, can kill the spirit and leave you wanting while the world moves on around you. You find that once you start settling, it creates a pattern of settling because you don’t want to put in extra effort to be disappointed again. It also creates a mindset of just taking whatever comes your way.
Black women seem to be the prime candidates for settling. When we feel forced into a corner, we begin to accept anything and everything to make our lives move. Even if the move is to our detriment, we take it as a win because something happened. Something is just slightly different than it was the day before, we accept, and move on. Only to find that, yes, we moved, but in the completely wrong direction. Settling just to make a decision or get something done didn’t solve our problem. This is when time, meditation, prayer, and action come into play.
These are habits that can help when you feel like your settling to your detriment. Time is needed to parse through all of the possible outcomes when making one decision. It usually benefits us because we are allowed to think and give weight to each factor. Meditation in your spirit and prayer helps when making a decision because you can allow a higher power to speak to you whether it be The Most High or your Ancestors. During meditation and prayer, you can allow them to help guide you towards the decision that makes the most sense and puts you in a position to come out on top if it is in His plan for you. Once you have taken the time necessary to contemplate your decision, meditated, and prayed about it, the action is the last piece of the puzzle.
Action is the deciding factor of if you have settled or not after the decision is made. If you don’t want to feel like you just settled on a decision, then all of your efforts must be exerted to make the said decision feel worth it. If your heart was not in the decision or the effort exerted, then you just settled. We as women have to understand and interpret when settling is warranted and when we want more. We must understand that it is up to us to determine what we want, how we want, and sometimes, settling, just isn’t the way.
Staff Writer; Jessieca Carr
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