Choices

Posted by | November 24, 2013 | Food for thought, Uncategorized | One Comment

We have choices in our lives. In fact, we are overflowing with choices. Everything is a choice. I can do this. Or I can do that.

How we feel is a choice. I can feel this way. Or I can feel that way.

It’s all a choice. Every single moment. Yes, every moment. We can even choose to breath or not breath, though let’s not confuse a choice with the ability to actualize that choice all that way to the end. Nor does having choices mean we will be successful. We can choose steps along the way, but that’s no guarantee that we will achieve all we desire. Our choices can influence outcomes, but that’s about it.

Here’s the thing. Choices require a lot of thought and energy. We want to make the right choice. We feel stressed or angry or frustrated or (fill in your own blank) when we make the wrong choice. Especially when the consequences of those wrong choices come back and smack us in the face. We intuitively know that choices carries risk. Choices make us vulnerable. Because of this, we learn to make safer choices. And fewer choices. After all, the safest choice is the one you don’t make. It seems easier mentally, emotionally and psychologically easier to not make choices.

So we stop we making them. Over time, we forget that we stopped making choices. Eventually we get to a point where we don’t even think we have choices in the first place.

There are also many who’ve had their choices taken away from them, beaten out of them by cruel people or circumstances, from a very early age, even birth. For the vast majority of us, it’s a combination of both, the choices taken away, the ones we never knew we had, and those that we’ve given away.

But none of that matters. No matter how we got here, here is where we are. And from where we are right now, in this very moment, we can choose the very next thing we do. What word we say, what we feel, what we think.

Make a choice and own it. It’s yours.

One Comment

  • Arjen Dijkman says:

    I commented on your last writing piece first, but i read this peice first and i have to say please Boyd keep on posting little gems like these two pieces. I’ve come to know you as a creative, intelligent, insightful, sensitive, talented and very funny Scottish-German-American Colorado mountain man. The Boulder Bull or THe Colorado Chupacabra if you will 😉

    So in the famous words of Morten Harket (Google him you lazy so and so) “Stay On These Roads”