I was out walking and enjoying the cool air on my face. I felt invigorated by a walk along a sidewalk I was exploring for the first time, and then it happened.

I was in this beautiful experience, a wonderful walk when I noticed, once again, the tendency for skeptical doubts to arise. I often have a subtle thinking process involved with doubt. I may ask myself the following things: How things are going? Am I doing a good job? Is this a safe or useful way to do something? and so on.

So as I went back and forth between the bliss of a beautiful, chilly morning walk and a subtle, low-level concern that something is wrong, I was stopped short, transfixed on…

The sun glistening off of the frozen drops of what had been rain some hours before. The drops, hanging off of a metal loop in a neighbors yard, had frozen in the unusually chilly April morning air. I had a two-fold realization that caused me to relax quite a lot.

I was wondering about choices I’d made and doubting whether the timing of some things was good, bad, or otherwise when I realized that.

1. There’s no going back.
2. These thoughts are all self-created worry and, many if not most of them are not even based in reality or truth.
3. Old decisions cannot be remade.
4. So I can enjoy the present. (if I am not trying to go back)

You see, I realized anew that no matter what the doubt or concern is, I have a choice.

I can go with the doubt in my mind, a pattern long established, but of little to no use.

Or

I can be present to the beautiful, chilly morning and enjoy the walk.

You see, the message of the frozen droplets of water was that they were not there hours before, but existed right there and then just as they should be. Old decisions cannot be remade.

Looking back on it I imagine that almost for certain those icy drops are now gone…and that’s just how it is. Nothing wrong; nothing to change. No doubt.