Today, approximately 7,716,897,647 people woke up on the planet. They all have some basic choices that need to be made. It’s quite daunting to consider the complexity of that thought. These decisions are the foundation of our life and are the determinants of our successes and failures, joy and despair, as we journey along this road. Let’s be honest though, not everyone has equal choices. Based on one’s country of origin, familial lineage, physical limitations, and sometimes flat out luck, the access to greater choices can change. This a bewildering, and sobering fact that we all must acknowledge. A level playing field, it is not.
Given this backdrop, it is all the more important that we carefully assess the choices we have within our little corner of the universe. Being aware, seems to always loom so large in life. One of the problems our culture has (speaking as a resident of the United States) is an overabundance of choice. We are literally drowning in options. This can overwhelm our minds, in turn muddling our ability to truly arrive at the best choices for us, and our particular needs. It is critical we have a filtering system to deal with this onslaught of decisions.
There are hundreds of different drinks we can consume each day, a multitude of food choices, hundreds of stores to peruse, millions of books to consider, a never-ending array of entertainment options at our fingertips, a myriad of hobbies and interests beckoning, a plethora of voices in all forms of media seeking our attention, and our own internal daimon speaking to us about our true purpose.
When life is said and done, it is the sum total of these choices that makes us who we are, and how we are remembered. Those who are regular readers of this blog, are familiar with my admiration for a book written by Viktor Frankl, “Man’s Search for Meaning”. Frankl is a holocaust survivor, who had firsthand experience of knowing what it means to lose the ability to choose. He helps us to understand, that even in some of the most brutal conditions a human can experience, there is still an element of choice one has. He famously said, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
May we all cherish our ability to choose, it is truly a gift.
Comments