What are you willing to let go of?
There are two things in life that I carry around with me permanently. The first is my awareness of the role of choice in my life.
The reason why choice is so important is because it gives us agency. It puts us in a position where we feel like we are doing life. It is not simply being done to us.
Removing the phrase “I have no choice” from your vocabulary is one of the most liberating exercises you can go through. It’s the route of giving yourself agency.
For instance, if you are at work and it’s a Friday afternoon, 5pm. The last of the summer sun is shining outside and you’re dreaming of a cold post work refreshment to sign off the week. But your boss knocks on your desk and lands you with a deadline that means you’ll have to work for another two hours, and miss the last of those rays.
You know that you’re in line for a promotion in a few weeks’ time and one of the things your boss has made clear is that being shown to go above and beyond is something that will be expected to earn that promotion. In this instance, it can feel like you have no choice, right? If you don’t stay late, you’re putting that next step in your career at risk. You have to do it.
Except you don’t. You could choose to say, no, I can’t do this now. You have a choice to put your promotion at risk in order to enjoy that moment. Now that might not be the right choice or most optimal decision, but you have a choice. And recognising it makes you the protagonist in that situation. Suddenly, choosing to stay and work late is you prioritising your career prospects, rather than being subjected to someone else’s will and desires.
It is a dangerous position to believe we have no choice. We always have one, even when some of those choices are suboptimal. It is in recognising the choices available that we access agency for ourselves.
A 6 year old kid wrote a poem that captures the essence of choice and agency probably better than any philosopher I’ve ever come across:
Be the tiger.
Once we have agency, we recognise that we can choose what we to experience in our life. This is a central theme of Stoic philosophy, as expressed by two quotes from one of the school’s greatest fathers, Epictetus:
“There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.
The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.
”
The magical power of introducing choice and agency into our daily decisions and lives, is that we get to choose which external things we allow to impact us. We not only get to choice the actions in our life, but we get to choose our responses, too. While we can’t choose our emotions, we can choose how they impact on us. Whilst we may feel anger, we can choose as to whether or not we allow that to impact on those around us. Whilst we may feel embarrassment, we can choose as to whether or not we let that stop us from doing something that we want to.
The concepts of choice and control walk hand in hand in life.
“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control.
Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own.
”
What are the choices that you’re making in your daily routines and actions?
What lies within your control, and what lies outside of it?
Both of these questions beg you to ask the same thing of yourself: