CHOICES- WHY WE DO WHAT WE DO

Sometimes things go south. You’ve made your bed. Now you have to lie in it. You don’t see that coming despite having stacked up your contingencies and analyzed every micro detail before you made ‘that’ choice.

Ironically you make a choice because it seems right or it’s the best available alternative at that very moment in a linear world.

Imagine if we were to live in parallel universes traversing through an endless continuum of time and space. Our lives wouldn’t be defined by the choices we make since we wouldn’t have to live through an unforeseeable (hopefully finite) amount of time to know the net results of our choices. We could redefine or even reverse our choices if, at the moment of making a choice, we become aware of the future our choices create. That way, we could create an endless loop of starting all over again, every single time, no matter how poor our ‘initial’ choices were. A point of ‘NO RETURN’ would never exist.

Eleanor Roosevelt quoted ‘ In a sense, by the time we are adults, we are the sum total of the choices we have made’. Indeed that is true, but our lives are also the result of the choices we ‘did not make’ or simply put ‘inaction’. There are two possibilities that precede every choice and therefore dictates every subsequent outcome- To Do or Not.

If you were to ask me what could be the one thing that you could master to make life easier, I would say, it is the art of making choices.

No one wants to make a bad choice, not unless you are at the brink of insanity or willful self destruction.

Making a choice (or not) especially with primordial consequences is almost often like walking a rope dangerously dangling over a deep violent river.

You could stand on one end and decide not to walk at all, or you could take that leap of faith, place your foot, your arms hanging above the whooshing wind, hoping you would live to see whatever it is at the end of it.

Sometimes it’s the Hudson’s choice.

At a fundamental level, (not necessarily in the same order) choices are

i. influenced by our experiences and learnings (good and bad), everything that bottles up in our subconscious mind from the time we were born.

ii. the precise timing of that ‘event' (the event that elicits one to make a choice) in a scale of linear events. Choices would be a lot different, if the sequence of events were to change.

iii. Information available at the time (extent, source) and how we perceive it. A slightly different way of looking at things could yield very distinct choices.

iv. your mental readiness to accept at least that which is apparent with a particular choice.

v. Your priorities and objectives (which keeps shifting) with time.

vi. your predominant pyschological trait for making and accepting choices (are you a rational thinker driven by the insatiable need to plan and control outcomes or do your decisions come from the heart and you are more likely to go with the flow?)

That’s why choices that work for one person would not necessarily work for another.

No two individuals are the same, or at any given point of time, in the exact same situation with the exact same experiences, information or mental make-up.

Having a choice does not tantamount to having something rigged in your favour, although that’s a common misconception. The word ‘Choice’ in itself is abstract and neutral, it is the process of choosing and deciding sometimes under less than desirable circumstances that makes the whole act so volatile, yet definitive with staggering consequences.

Some of the choices we make can veer our lives towards a completely different outcome.

Some work out, some don’t.

Unfortunately, in the world we live in, choices are not seen as an extension of a person and by that virtue undeniably redeemable. Rather, they become personified with the one making them. Choices become us. We become our choices.

Unless we invent the time machine to leap in to the past or develop prophetic abilities to discern what awaits us, sometimes we would have to learn to live with the choices we make, forgive ourselves if things don’t work out (after all, worse things happen at sea) and pray that we get the wisdom to make better ones.

Till then, be a little less judgemental.

Be kind.