A post I made about unconditional love on the “Life Is A Fork In The Road” Facebook page has raised the question about whether humans are capable of true unconditional love. Here is how it began: “Love is unconditional. It is a spiritual state, not an emotion. It’s not a choice you pick at a fork in the road….it exists forever.” Is this just an ideal we strive for but can never attain or is it possible for a human to actually love someone unconditionally, love them even if they do something we hate or they decide to leave us?

When someone leaves you, do you still love them?

The human condition is affected by all types of pushes and pulls from our emotions, upbringing, personality, temperament, ego and experiences. This makes us who we are and it also makes us imperfect and fallible. Of course, that’s what makes life interesting. Can we rise above all this and actually love someone unconditionally? The post I made was not just something I pulled from the sky because it sounded nice. It was based on my own personal experiences and observations. Now, for the first time since I started collecting stories from others eight months ago, I am going to share an inner voice experience of my own that first awakened me to what true unconditional love means. This is a real life love story on many levels.

The year is 1986. After being happily married for 11 years, my wife suddenly and without warning told me she was divorcing me to go back to a man she had dated before we met. There were no obvious problems in our relationship. No arguments. Nothing was going on to indicate any trouble brewing. Even after she told me this, she never said there was anything wrong with us. She just said that she had come to realize she loved this other guy in a way she didn’t love me and that’s all it was about. Two days after she told me this, she moved into an apartment. The guy left his wife of 25 years that same day and moved in with her. They got married within the year and are still together.

Hearing this completely out of the blue crushed me. It was like I was run over by a steam roller. I have never before nor ever sense felt pain like that. I had imagined we would spend the rest of our life together. I didn’t want anyone else. I loved this woman with all my heart. There is no way to describe the hurt and pain I felt. It was like every cell in my body was being torn apart and run through a food processor.

Yet, within hours of hearing this something else from deep within me spoke loud and clear. This was my true inner voice of wisdom. I still loved this woman as much as I had before she broke the news. I still wanted her to be happy. I still cared about her. If she would be more happy with someone else rather than me, that was her choice. I realized at that moment that if you truly love someone, you want them to be happy, you want the best for them even if that means not being with you.

This realization did not make the pain and hurt go away. It was so severe and intense that it took me over three years to finally get back to being me. All my friends told me she was no good and would say unkind things about her. They thought that would make me feel better. They simply didn’t understand. The way I saw it, how can someone go from loving someone to not loving them overnight just because they did something you didn’t want. That would negate the previous 11 years as if they never existed.

A couple months after she left, I did a very strange thing which was the next step in helping me move forward with my life. Once again, my inner voice of wisdom came through loud and clear. Suddenly, I started thinking about this guy she went back to and how he must be feeling. I literally began to look at this through his eyes instead of mine. That inspired me to write the lyrics to a love song written from his point of view.

Ticking

Lyrics by Don Shapiro

Courtesy of Rykristo Music Pubishing

You told me we were through

It was what we had to do

We made our beds before we met

When our love’s fate was set

Our homes blazing oh so bright

With anger and more in plain sight

So we sought solace as one

Embraced away hurt on the run

(chorus)

It wasn’t right

Oh, no

It wasn’t right

To fly away in the night

To believe we could unite

So you hid our love

Deep inside of you

Tucked away from view

Ticking

Just ticking

Ticking for too many years

Ticking through a thousand tears

You locked your love far away

Deep in memory so they say

We became friends for many years

Saying hi without any tears

The years have taken flight

Family chains wrapped so tight

As our seedlings grew up, oh wow

You’ve come back for my love no

(chorus repeats)

(bridge to finale)

You couldn’t keep your love locked away

Just ticking til judgment day

So you threw away that old bed

And came back to me like they said

How was I able to still consider her happiness as being of paramount importance after what she had done? How could I go through the most devastating pain and hurt imaginable without having any ill feelings toward her? How could I possibly write a song lyric that was a love song written from the other guy’s point of view? There is one and only one answer to these questions. I loved this woman unconditionally regardless of what she did. I am living proof that it is possible for a human being to love unconditionally.

It’s one thing to wax philosophically about what we believe is and is not possible concerning the human condition until we are thrown into the fire and discover how we respond in the moment. I wasn’t thinking about the meaning of love or the concept of unconditional love before this happened. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before so I was not prepared for it. Maybe we never are. If you had asked me a year earlier what I would do under such a circumstance, I’m sure my answer would have been different than what I actually did. How I responded to this situation came from deep within my heart and it was as real as it gets. My reaction surprised me and inspired me.

Since then, I have given a lot of thought to the meaning of love versus how the word is thrown around all too easily. From this experience, I came to learn what true love means. The test of true love, unconditional love is this: would you still love the person even if they did something awful or left you for another? Would you still care about them and want the best for them? If you can answer that question yes, you love unconditionally. If you answer that question no, what you are feeling is not love. It may be a very strong emotion and feeling of attachment but it is not love

The state of true love occurs when the love that is inside of us aligns at a deep energy and frequency level with the love that is inside of someone else. This connection isn’t about desire, attraction, enjoyment, similar interest, common values or emotions. It is something that simply happens outside of human control. Once that internal love alignment occurs, it will last forever. It can never be broken. Our spirit is forever connected to the other person’s spirit regardless of what happens with us on a human level.

I honestly don’t know why some people have the capacity to love unconditionally and others do not. It is still a mystery to me why I was able to act and feel this way through such a nightmare. I have my doubts whether anyone could do this if they wanted to. From my experience, this was not a choice. It simply reflected the state of love that existed inside of me and my natural and normal response due to that state of love. It may be just fine for many people to exist in relationships based on strong emotional ties that they call love even though, in reality, it is not love at all. Unconditional love may sound like something wonderful but it appears we have no control over its occurrence though it would be something that I would hope all people would strive to find.

Relationships are conditional. True love is not. We can and will place all kinds of conditions on having a relationship with someone based on a laundry list of human issues. We may decide we don’t want someone in our life anymore, even one of our children if their behavior is too awful for us to handle. Most parents love their children unconditionally, even step children and ones they adopt. If we truly love, love unconditionally, then regardless of what someone does, we will still love them whether we want them in our life or not or whether they want us in their life or not. True love never dies. Love is a spiritual state, not an emotion.

How can we know when our choices are a justified risk versus just rolling the dice? We should never just choose to do something because we fear we might regret it later. At the same time, we have to find a way to overcome our natural fears about making risky choices.

Anyone who advances themselves whether moving up the career ladder as an employee or in their own business has to take risk. Anyone who succeeds in raising a family or stays married for a long time has to take risk. Successful people generally make the right choices over 80% of the time. So, yes, you are going to strike out sometimes in order to achieve anything meaningful. But, you need to learn how to take risk that turn out in your favor most of the time. How you make choices when faced with an uncertain outcome is the primary focus of my book research.

Let me offer four tips that can reduce the risk of the choices you make and improve your batting average:

1. Gather the maximum amount of information possible before you make any choices.

That includes ALL the facts that are available (not just the facts you liked the best), observations, readings on the subject, opinions of experts and respected colleagues and more. You reduce the risk substantially by knowing everything you can about the various choices you have.

From my experience, many bad choices could have been avoided had someone actually done their homework instead of rushing in on a whim. You need to be about 10 times more thorough in collecting information than you think will be necessary. Maximum thoroughness is the operative phrase for great choices.

2 All the information you gather gets fed into your subconscious mind where your choices can best be evaluated

That’s where 90% of your brain power resides. That’s where the greatest logical and analytical thinking occurs. You can’t figure it out your choices simply using your conscious thoughts which are quite limited. While you should do whatever you can with conscious thought, you need to allow this information to percolate in your subconscious for a while.

When you do this, you will get messages from inside yourself about which choices make more sense. Reflect on these messages carefully. Make sure they are coming from the right place and not from emotional feelings or desires. You may want something really bad. Be carefully that this desire is not influencing the conclusions your subconscious mind is delivering.

3. Pay very close attention to comparisons such as risk versus reward, advantages versus disadvantages, ease versus difficulty, etc.

Unless you have a list of the problems, weaknesses, cost and concerns of making a choice, you haven’t done your homework. Period. Successful choices are not just about thinking positively.

4. Really look yourself in the mirror and be honest about whether you have the skill, talent and knowledge to successfully handle these choices.

Maybe it will be a good choice for you after you have learned some new skills that are critical for the path you want to pursue. Maybe once you get those skills you will discover that the original choice isn’t so good and a much better one presents itself to you.

What I’ve learned is that going through these four steps allows the best choices to rise to the top and the rest to sink of their own weight.

How has a tiny choice changed your life?

In a typical day, we make over 200 choices which add up to over 10,000 choices a year. You may have put many of those choices on automatic pilot but they are choices that you could change if you wanted to. And each of those forks in the road has the potential to alter the course of your life.

At first, that might seem like an absurd thing to say. Until you really start thinking about it. Take some of the most basic things you do in the morning. First, you have a choice whether to get up or stay in bed. Now, staying in bed has consequence which is why you normally get out of bed whether you want to or not. But supposing you actually spent 10 minutes one morning pondering this before you got up. Now you are 10 minutes behind schedule. Let’s imagine that even with rushing you still are late for everything that day.

What affect could being 10 minutes late for everything have? You’d be on the road to your work or taking the kids to school 10 minutes later than normal. Maybe by doing so you missed an accident you would have been involved in otherwise. Or you discovered an opportunity you would have missed. Or you connected with an old friend you hadn’t seen in years. The list of possible changes is endless.

Take the same “what if” approach toward changing the order of your morning routine, forgetting to brush your teeth, changing what you eat in the morning or letting your kids go to school in mismatched clothes because your late. Each of these forks in the road blossoms into hundreds of new possibilities that didn’t exist if you had stayed on your auto pilot routine. And we’ve only talked about the first 90 minutes in the morning so far. Oh my.

Just imagine what might happen if you made different choices about ordinary things that occur throughout your day. Alter one task, shift when you do things by as little as a minute or say something to someone you know you’ve never said before and you may have started an avalanche of events that could touch your life for weeks, months or years.

When we think about our choices, we tend to focus on the obvious ones. Those things we actually took the time to seriously think out or something critical we had to respond to in the moment. Of course, those are choices too. And those choices can dramatically affect our little world.

Yet, a series of tiny choices often leads us down a path we had not intended or considered. Taken as a whole, those 50, 100 or more micro choices can actually produce one gigantic choice for us. Sometimes we don’t see where this is all taking us. Sometimes we can look back and feel that events outside of our control put us in this place. Or, perhaps, something unseen, deep inside of us or beyond us, led us to take longer than normal brushing our teeth that morning. Like a pebble thrown into a pond, these mirco choices can ripple out shaping major directions for our life and those around us.

When you ponder what affects the choices you make or how you could improve those choices in the future, look behind your logical and analytical decision making methods. Ask yourself if something is happening in your subconscious mind or from sources outside of yourself that might be guiding some of your choices. At the same time, reflect on situations where you have resisted these forces and what happened as a result.

Every year we face over 10,000 forks in the road. Whether through conscious choice or automatic conditioning, each of those choices shapes our future. And each of those choices is a story waiting to be told.

In 2005, my step daughter Kristin and I engaged in a lengthy email exchange about a problem she was facing. She had written me a long email explaining what was going on. So I wrote her a long email back. Then she wrote me a long email in response. That led to another email from me.

By the time we got to the third round of these long emails, I was digging pretty deep inside myself for something that might be helpful. Kristin is a thinker. She analyzes everything and then analyzes her analysis. I guess I was trying to find a way to help her look at her situation through a fresh window.

I was halfway through my third long email typing at over 120 words a minute, just cruising along the writer’s highway, when out of nowhere I said “Kristin, life is a fork in the road…follow your head or follow your heart.”

While the rest of the thoughts expressed in those emails are long forgotten, the phrase “life is a fork in the road” took on a life of its own. It followed me around. More thoughts about its meaning crept into my awareness. So I started writing these ideas down.

This went on for over a year before it occurred to me that I was starting to write a book. Another year went by while I continued to jot ideas down. Around that time, I sold a condo I owned in Las Vegas to Derian King. One day while talking with her, I told her about my book idea. She is the first person outside of my family I had ever mentioned it to.

Derian’s eyes lighted up and she told me a story about how she saved a couple stranded in a snowstorm with their baby because a voice told her to turn left at the signal. That story was the first one shared on this website. Her reaction made me wonder if I was on to something.

After hearing Derian’s story, I got this nagging feeling I was missing something important about my book. It was a few months later when I realized that I needed to go out and collect other people’s “fork in the road” stories. Then I discovered I needed to collect enough stories to support the conclusions of the book. This meant a full scale research project so the results of all the stories collected could shape the book’s conclusions.

It took another couple of years before I was able to figure out the best way to conduct that research and move this project forward. Now “fork in the road” story collection is in full swing thanks to the reach of the internet. “Life Is A Fork In The Road” found me. Since then, I have been guided by an inner voice and serendipitous events to turn it into a book and research project. Every step this project has taken all illustrate the message of the book. We do seem to be guided by something beyond ourselves that knows the best paths for us to follow….if we would only listen!

If you strip it down to its very core, life is about making choices. Our life is filled with millions of choices big and small. Imagine a tree the size of our solar system with branches leading to branches and more branches. Each of those branches represents a fork we took, a choice we made. The path of all those forks combined IS your life.

If you never made a choice, you would have to stay in one place without moving, changing your clothes, eating or doing anything else. Getting out of bed is a choice. Brushing your teeth is a choice. Talking to someone is a choice. Stating your opinion is a choice. Getting in a car is a choice. Apologizing is a choice. Reading the newspaper is a choice. Looking at someone is a choice. Going to work is a choice. Thinking about something is a choice. Life involves thousands of choices every day some of which we do automatically as habit. Life IS a fork in the road.

Change one tiny choice and you change your day, maybe your entire life. Imagine this possibility. What happens if you changed your morning routine one day and by doing so delayed getting in your car to drive to work by 10 minutes? If you had kept to your routine, you would have been on the road 10 minutes earlier and might have been seriously hurt or killed in an accident that occurred on your normal route. What lead you to change your routine? Nothing happens by chance. There are no coincidences in life.

Whether you avoided something serious like an accident or just avoided having to talk with an overly chatty neighbor, have you ever made a tiny choice that resulted in a surprising outcome? Share your story here.

Life IS a fork in the road.

Don sitting in a client's boardroom overlooking the nation's Capital

(This post originally was a comment posted about a blog on www.savvysassymoms.com)

No one else can tell you what you should be doing with your life. You are the expert on you. The trick is getting beyond all the logic and analysis which needs to be done so you can finally hear your inner voice. Picking the right Fork In The Road often comes down to feeding your inner self with enough information and then knowing when your inner wisdom has figured it all out.

Great career choices come down to doing what you are passionate about and have a talent for. The passion drives you and the talent insures you can do it well. Here are some simple steps that can help you wade through your options and give your inner wisdom the information it needs to guide you.

1. Passion What would you do even if you weren’t paid to do it? Make a list of all those things. Sometimes, it isn’t any one thing on the list but the pattern of seeing many things on the list that can open your eyes.

2. Talent List all the things you are really, really good at. That’s not just about what you have done on the job. If you are a homemaker, you have to be great at many task. Almost all of them translate into skills that can be used to make money. If you are over forty, you already have a Ph.d. in making things work in the real world! It’s important that you choose something where you have a lot of talent. Otherwise you could pick something you love but you might not be very good at.

3. What are you bad at or hate doing? Yes, you need to make this list too. No career is perfect. You are going to have to do some things you are not good at and some things you dislike. Make sure those represent less than 20% of all the task and time involved in your career choice. Try to get it down to 10%. Otherwise you are likely to lose motivation over time and not accomplish as much as you wanted to.

Ultimately, the best choice for you won’t come from your analysis of these lists. They start your mental and spiritual juices flowing. The real answer will be worked out behind the scenes in your unconscious (and from above).

Don’t rush this. Don’t force it. Be patient and wait for a sign, an inner voice or a feeling that suddenly feels right at a very deep level. Confusion, frustration, cloudiness, uncertainty, anxiety and all the rest will just vanish to be replaced by a calm, peaceful, radiant knowing. You will feel it down to the core of your being. Now go for it! That is the right Fork In The Road for you.

If you’ve ever listened to your inner voice or feelings to make a choice, please share your story on this website. I am collecting 1000’s of stories for the book I am writing “Life Is A Fork In The Road.” Your story is important because it will add something unique from all the rest. What I learn from all these stories added together may help us better understand how we can make better choices in the future and learn more about how the universe works.