Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
I made myself a promise a few months ago and now that the time has come near to making good on that promise I'm beginning to second guess myself.
It's not that I have any doubts about what I should do - because I don't - it's the 'want' I have a problem with. I don't want to live with the consequences of my actions despite the fact that I know it's the right thing to do.
I'm not going to bore you with the details of my dilemma because it's a personal matter.
What I'm more interested in right now is whether or not it's acceptable to go against what you believe in and know to be right?
Let's face it, our principles are largely what separate us from savages. It's the things that we believe in so strongly that make us the people we are and if we can't stick to what we preach to others then our words and opinions lose their importance and we lose all credibility, not only to others but to ourselves as well.
Who among us can honestly say that we haven't acted against the very same advice we've given others?
It's easy enough to look at another person's problems from a detached perspective - and from a distance the right decision is easy to see - but when we look at the same problem in ourselves it's a lot harder to be objective.
For some reason, when we're looking introspectively, we manage to convince ourselves that it's a different situation all together.
If a friend was going through the decision process I'm going through, I'd tell her without a doubt that she should be sticking to her guns no matter what the outcome.
Some things really are as simple as they seem; 2+2=4 no matter how much someone else tells you it doesn't. But more often than not when it comes to ourselves we see what we want to see and if 4 isn't the answer we're looking for we can convince ourselves the + sign isn't there at all and in fact we're simply looking at the number 22 which has nothing to do with the number 4.
When we allow our emotions to cloud what we know to be logical we become unable to trust our decision-making process.
We know our minds are the logical choice to go with but our hearts speak louder and we tend to listen to them more often, despite the fact that they can often lead us down the wrong path.
What we want and what we should do can often be very different things. In order to stay separate from savages we must stick to our ethics and beliefs but in doing so we can run the risk of losing the very thing that makes us humans - our emotions.
What I will do when the time comes I can't yet say. My choice is to stick to my truth and end up unhappy with my decision even though I know it's the right one or go against what I know to be right and follow my emotions in the faint hope that my logical mind is wrong and everything will turn out happy in the end.
Editor's note: If your wife suggests you don't understand women, show her this column! (Apologies to Marie-Claire)
