Finding Alternatives
By Dr. Synesio Lyra, Jr.
There is hardly any situation or challenge you face in life which does not offer you an alternative or more, to accomplish what requires your attention. If you are truly attentive, and prepared to employ discernment, you can succeed.
That’s why it’s always wise for people to have different plans for the accomplishment of most tasks. If plan A fails one can turn to plan B, then C, and so on! Someone went as far as to suggest that “when everything is falling part, it is a good sign that everything is about to come together.”
Sadly, many individuals are so calcified in following procedures by doing them in just one way that they cannot think of taking any unknown path, or tackling anything differently from what they’ve been accustomed to do.
Yet, even in occasions when you can still achieve your purposes with what you have and know, you may also find more creative and efficient ways of getting to where you need to go, or desire to arrive!
As I read somewhere, “anything worth doing is worth doing, period.” In other words, whatever legitimate way you can find to achieve your objectives, just follow it; don’t limit yourself to what has been a common practice in the past. Improvements are invented everyday and whatever may have functioned so well in times past now has novel and more efficient manners of achieving the same in record time, and often with better results!
There is an old, true story about a couple of generations of housewives in the same family which, every time they had a fish fry for the family, they would remove a chunk of the fish and throw it out. That procedure one day was finally questioned by a young female member of the third generation. She asked her mother why did they do it that way? The mother simply responded that they had always done it that way. The girl then posed the same inquiry to her grandmother who was able to explain the reason sought. She said, “The only reason we did that was because the frying pan was not large enough to accommodate the entire fish.” Yet, all along they could have utilized other alternatives, either by buying a larger frying pan or cutting the fish into several portions which would fit the frying utensil!
There’s hardly any situation in life which leaves us without additional paths to follow; you can find better alternatives to embrace. Be sure you never become passive to just one way of doing things, when several others are equally available, and some are far more efficient! You need not be a slave to a sole manner of doing things, especially when it makes no sense at all!
