December 10 - Wisdom

I’m participating in Gwen Bell’s #reverb10 challenge this month which means 31 days filled with daily writing/photography prompts meant to reflect on the past year and at the same time look ahead.

What was the wisest decision you made this year, and how did it play out?

After 14 years in a relationship that had gone horribly bad after about 4 years, I left. After 10 years of contest, conflict, competition, bartering, badgering and all around crankiness, I walked into the bedroom and simply stated, I don't want to be in this relationship anymore. It had been a long time coming, years in the making, but after four days spent with a friend, who would, it turns out, be my soul's mate, and many, many tears, it was easy, and the words fell right from my lips.

Wisdom is a strange word defined as a deep understanding and realizing of people, things, events or situations, resulting in the ability to choose or act to consistently produce the optimum results with a minimum of time and energy. It is the ability to optimally (effectively and efficiently) apply perceptions and knowledge and so produce the desired results. Wisdom is also the comprehension of what is true or right coupled with optimum judgment as to action. Synonyms include: sagacity, discernment, or insight. Wisdom often requires control of one's emotional reactions (the "passions") so that one's principles, reason and knowledge prevail to determine one's actions.

How did it play out? Better than I could ever have imagined, different from everything I thought could ever be. I had known so deeply in my soul that there was more, that love could be had, held, real, I knew that she had been so wrong for me, and yet I had stayed, and tried, and toiled. But here I was, in this new life, back in a place I loathed, and yet blissfully, completely and entirely whole and happy. I had lived for years in fear, fear of reprisal, fear of losing, fear of being alone. But the fear was so outweighed but the prize that I saw in front of me, that I leapt, I grasped for the brass ring, and my hand came back full of jewels.