It's time to make Terminal Decisions -Benjamin Zulu

If you’re tired of fighting the same cyclic battles, slaying the same dragons that keep resurrecting, consider this ‘Kamikaze mission’ kind of tactics.

Terminal decisions are those decisions that touch on the ending of your life. They serve as a hook to pin the conclusion of your life at a particular location in terms of moral direction and significant goals.

It’s more like deciding the destination ahead so that you can trace the route backward, especially if you’ve noticed that you keep veering off and your path is full of meanders and detours.

In normal goal setting you determine to aim at a certain target. In terminal decision making, however, you bind yourself to a particular outcome or else you die.

Death is a shock and it inspires the greatest degree of resolve especially when you know it’s not a joke.

One man was told by a doctor that if he continued smoking he would be dead within six months. For years he had been trying to quit smoking but he kept relapsing. This time, however, he threw his cigarettes in the trash can right there and then and never smoked again.

You take this radical step when you’re already threatened by death or a meaningless life, which is just the same thing.

Perhaps for years now you keep going back to the same toxic relationship. Every time it happens, for months your life has no bearing. This year perhaps you relapsed once and before you knew it the year was gone.

It is for this kind of problems that you say ‘I will go a different direction from this habit or I die trying. I will avoid this path even if I have to risk my life doing it.’

Terminal decisions are vows and they carry psychological energy and sometimes even spiritual backing. You will begin to experience interruptions and strange coincidences that will help uou not fall back. At the same time when you would have slipped back, something else will happen to distract you and restore your sanity.

In short, like the men who vowed to kill Paul, you ‘bind yourself with an oath and a curse,’ to stick to a certain path. That path pertains to the meaning of your life and it’s the only way to make your life meaningful. So you force yourself by means of a covenant and a prayer.

No better time to make such decisions like end of year when everything has paused to give you room to take a birds eye view of your life and see what kind of ending you want.