5. On Choice
It took me a long time to realise the true power of choice, and the impact on our lives through how we exercise it.
Over the years, there have been so situations where I convinced myself that I had no choice in a circumstance.
For me, a poignant example would be when asked to attend an event of your partner’s family. Say it was an important event, a wedding of a sibling. Your partner has a strong bond with that sibling, a lifelong confidant. You’ve been dating for a year or so, you’ve met the brother or sister a few times, and sort of get along. But you’re not close. Everyone knows it. But does it really matter? Because ultimately you don’t have a choice as to whether or not to go to the wedding, right? This is just one example of when I might have admitted to myself “well it doesn’t matter what else I might have on that day, or that the wedding is in the middle of nowhere, I don’t have a choice. I obviously have to go.”
But as an adult, you always have a choice. In this case, you can choose not to go. Now, that choice is going to lead to consequences - we can’t escape those - and, in this case, likely cause hurt to other people. But it is still a choice available to you in that situation.
The act of acknowledging that you have a choice is powerful. Because it takes you from “I don’t have a choice” to “I am choosing to this.” And this grants us a feeling of agency; that we are happening to our circumstances, rather than being passive bystanders to them.
Telling ourselves that we don’t have a choice is such an easy narrative to adopt; if we tell ourselves that we don’t have a choice over something, we don’t have to take responsibility for anything. It’s a useful avoidance tactic. But one that comes at the expense of our own agency over our lives.
Recognising and taking ownership of the below belief has, I believe, created the most significant impact on my life in that it forced me, after many years, to understand what it means to take personal responsibility:
In adult life, you always have a choice.
“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters [e.g. events, actions, outcomes] so that I can say clearly to myself which are external factors not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control.”
I think a great example of this is being in traffic. Imagine a feel-good-vibes song is playing on the radio (say, Stolen Dance - Milky Chance). You’re moving along peacefully making your way to wherever you need to be, and someone suddenly cuts in front of you. You’re forced to touch your brakes to avoid an accident. It’s rude, it’s selfish, and they don’t say thank you. No sheepish wave of their hand in the rear-view or briefest flicker of their hazard lights to acknowledge their action.
That person’s decision is completely beyond your control. Not only that, but the situation you now find yourself in - being one car further back and further from your destination - is also beyond your control. You’re stuck in traffic, after all. You might even feel an involuntary flush of emotion; whether that be surprise, a touch of annoyance, or even anger. The act of feeling an emotion is not always in our control, either. But what is always under our control, is how you react to that situation.
“We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them.”
A ruthless, lifelong commitment to pursuing the above thought has the ability to bring levels of calm, rationality and, ultimately, happiness that, in my experience, can be unmatched.
In that moment sitting in your car, you have a choice.
You can choose to let the uncontrollable actions of another person ruin your day, or at least a portion of it. You can choose to see this as yet another example of the world always going against you. You can choose to see this as evidence of how selfish everyone is, and what an uncaring world we live in.
Or you can choose to acknowledge the brief emotion you felt (anger, surprise, frustration), let it pass you by, turn the chorus up one notch and get back to Milky’s smooth melodies.
Maybe that person who cut in front of you has just received terrible news about a relative’s health and they’re desperately racing to the hospital. They might not have the mental capacity to think of anyone else right now. Maybe they really are a selfish person who is out entirely for themself. The point is that either way, it doesn’t matter. Their actions are beyond your control. So why worry about them? You can always choose how to react.
We cannot always choose or even influence the circumstances or events that happen around us, but we can always choose how we respond.
I have seen the biggest gains in my perspective on situations when I’ve applied this across any facet of life; in the office with a micro-managing boss, on a sports field when a teammate misplaces a pass, during a boardgame when you pick up the exact card you desperately needed to avoid. We cannot control these external events, but we can always control how we react to them.
Jean Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher, thought a lot about emotions and the role they play in our lives. I vividly remember moments in my life when I have been a slave to my emotions. I felt like I had no control; they controlled me. I felt that I always had to react to an emotion. But Sartre provides a completely different perspective on their role. Like anxiety, he believed that emotions exist because their role is to provide us with information.
Sartre believed that emotions are there to inspire the choices that we make. Whenever you’re angry, you’re angry about something that happened, and the same for when you’re sad - you’re sad about something. But Sartre says that we should use our emotions as strategies.
Emotions will always happen to us. We will always feel them because they’re our personal way of alerting us to the notion that we’ve experienced something that doesn’t quite align with what we expected. But over time, if we realise that we have agency and control over how we react to situations, then we can actually change how we feel about those same situations.
Being conscious of emotions in this way, creates freedom. In fact, it creates the ultimate freedom because it unleashes the possibility for us to do anything we choose to.
Viktor Frankl, author of the incredibly powerful autobiography, Man's Search for Meaning, the best-selling book based on his experiences in various Nazi concentration camps, realised the following through his horrific experiences:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
His use of the words ‘growth’ and ‘freedom’ are particularly moving. This was a man who was subjected to the very worst of humanity’s depravity in those camps. Yet, he was still able to experience moments of joy, and happiness, fleeting though they were, through his ability to focus his happiness only on the things he could control. He could not control his circumstances, but he could control how he reacted to them. And in that, in the most desperate of circumstances where it seemed the very concept of happiness had been squashed from the earth he stood on, he was able to savour it. In those circumstances, he was able to experience freedom.
“Character is determined by choice, not opinion.”
Acknowledging that you always have a choice, no matter the circumstances, is what gives someone the power to experience freedom. When we ignore our ability to choose how we respond, a choice in itself, that is the moment that we descend down the path to giving up our agency, and therefore our sense of freedom. We descend into feeling as though we are victims, slaves to the whims of the world and those around us.
Recently, in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, Angela Merkel, the ex-German Chancellor, said this:
“Freedom does not mean that everyone does what they want, but that everyone is responsible; for themselves, for their own family, their colleagues at work. The virus has made clear, we are all part of a larger whole.”
Once we accept the level of responsibility that says ‘We always have a choice’, we can always choose to control how we respond, and it then that we create the opportunity to experience growth and freedom.
And when we acknowledge that everyone around us has that same level of responsibility, we create that same space for growth and freedom in the society that surrounds us.
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These posts are written to remind our readers that; Life is hard, we’re all just trying our best and we could all do with a little help, no matter where it comes from.
How did the thoughts above impact on how you think about Learning from Choice? We’d love to hear your comments below.