Life’s Sticky Choices

Perseverance often comes down to this: Choosing between extremely bad circumstances and tolerably bad circumstances.

Take the bobcats pictured here, for instance. The one stationed high atop the saguaro cactus in Arizona was escaping the wrath of a mountain lion. The one straddling two cacti in New Mexico found the prickly perch preferable to the pack of wild dogs that had been chasing him. (Neither one probably anticipated or appreciated having to stay up there while humans stood below snapping photographs.) They did what they had to and worked with whatever limited resources were available.

The older we get, the more of these choices we have to make—about our health, our finances, our jobs, our homes. The economic trials of the last few years have forced many more people into similarly uncomfortable decisions.

But keep your chin up and remember: It’s always relative, never absolute.

“Bad is never good until worse happens.”
—Danish Proverb

[Arizona pics by Curt Fonger, courtesy of a Lull reader (thank you!); New Mexico pic by Paco Espinoza.]