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I've made both good and bad decisions in my life, and that has helped me learn a bunch of things, some useless, some important.

But one of the most important ones I've learned is when it's important, stay and fight, don't cut and run.

I know there are times where it's either retreat or be killed, and I understand that sometimes, the best thing to do is to wait to fight another day. But we're not talking about warfare here. We're talking about life -- and in life, being a coward is rarely the best method to take.

I'm reminded of the old quote from Robert Frost: "The best way out is always through." In our lives, we confront various challenges, some of which can make our life better, and some of which can alter it in radically different ways. In many of these cases, our usual approach is to sit back, stall a bit, and wait for an answer to materialize. Most of the time, too many of us stay stalled, stay stationary, and never really move. The decision is never made, the change is never effected, and we never really take the first step.

Quite often, what we wind up doing is to lengthen the pain and trouble that turns up in our lives, rather than make a potentially life-changing change. We don't take a risk -- we don't even make a start. We waffle about the challenge, or we put it out of our mind.

Let's get this one thing straight and out in the open in this discussion: sometimes you're going to make a mistake in your decision, but to never move, never choose, never decide is itself a decision to embrace mediocrity and live a life in twilight, never living, never growing, never changing, except where change is thrust upon us by outside events.

Does confronting our challenges make sense? There's nothing else that does. Ignoring the challenges in our life never makes much sense, while confronting our challenges and embracing the change they bring is usually the best way to proceed.

Copyright, 2011, by Daryl R. Gibson. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted for the non-commercial redistribution of this document as long as it remains intact with this copyright and all other lines. This license does not extend to the use of this material in a compilation, whether for profit or non-profit use. Join us at http://www.Weekdaywisdom.com.