Be at Peace with the Decisions You Make

Are you at peace with the decisions you make in life? On Sunday after church I was talking to a friend who is a teacher, and I indicated that for the Virtual Literary World Tour, I said that I would virtually visit 30 countries, and to date I have done 26, and I haven’t read the 70 books so I am feeling like I have let myself down. She was shocked, and told me that I should be proud of myself because she has been reading the same book for more than a month. This friend is a voracious reader – the majority of my friends are voracious readers.

Last week through Scoop.it, I discovered the Bout of Books read-a-thon, and I committed to reading six books from the evening of May 13^th to May 19^th. I participated in the read-a-thon and read the six books because I have been feeling as if I have plateaued and wanted to work through the slump. Early Monday morning at 3:00 am I awoke. I was feeling distressed because it suddenly hit me that it was impossible for me to read some of the books I committed to reading for the Virtual Literary World Tour. I got out of bed and decided that the only way I could return to sleep is if I decided which books I cannot read.

For the first Virtual Literary World Tour I decided that I couldn’t read:

1. Anne of Green Gables & Anne of Avonlea (Children's Classics), LM Montgomery
2. Doppler, Erlend Loe
3. Wave, Sonali Deraniyagala
4. Angela's Ashes: A Memoir, Frank McCourt
5. Bhagavad-Gita As It Is
6. Herzog (Penguin Classics), Saul Bellow
7. Brother Man (Macmillan Caribbean Writers Series), Roger Mais
8. A House for Mr. Biswas, VS Naipaul
9. The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
10. Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, John Milton
11. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
12. No Telephone to Heaven, Michelle Cliff

I had already struck some books off the list. Since February 1^st to now, I have read over 70 books – although I haven’t read all of them for the Virtual Literary World Tour – while working on client work and volunteer work. The expectations I had of myself was unrealistic, but despite that, how many people can honestly say that they have read over 70 books written by authors from 26 countries? Life is a marathon, and not a sprint, and I was reminded of that as I was deciding which books I would not be able to read by May 31^st. I am at peace with the decision I have made. To see the books I have read so far for the first Virtual Literary World Tour click on the link.

Here are the books I will try to read by May 31^st, and if I am unable to read all of them, I am at peace with that as well.

1. The Bookseller of Kabul, Asne Seierstad
2. Njal's Saga (Penguin Classics)
3. A Grain of Wheat (Penguin African Writers), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
4. Arrow of God, Chinua Achebe
5. My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk, Orhan Pamuk
6. The Journey to the West, Revised Edition, Volume 1, Wu Cheng’en
7. The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
8. The Book Thief, Markus Zusak (I started to read it before and put it down)
9. The Handmaid's Tale (Everyman's Library), Margaret Atwood

As an effective leader, we have to make decisions every day, some of those decisions are good and some of them not so good, but you have to be at peace with the decisions you make – good or bad. What do you have to add to the conversation? Please write your comments in the box below.