Choice
Thursday, 18th December 2008
Choice
Call it “what goes around comes around”, “Karma” or “what you sow you shall reap”. Or is it simply the consequence of bad choices that rewards us with the weight of our decisions? Time to contemplate cause and effect.
My Birthday is coming up. It used to be an important day for the druids back in the age of the Stonehenge. Summer Solice. Sol + stice is derived from a combination of Latin words meaning ‘sun’ + ‘and to stand still’. As a major celestial event, the summer solice results in the longest day and the shortest night of the year. As we live in the southern hemisphere summer solice occurs this year Descember 21 2008 at 10:04pm AEST. Maybe God stretched out my b-day by making it the longest day of the year :)
The Mayans also predicted that that time would end as we know it (some call it the end of the world) on the 21st December 20012. The truth is none of us can forsee our expiry date. I want to look back at my life and have no regrets. Is such a thing even possible? It seems every choice we make has a profound impact on ourselves, our environment and others, to the extent that our choices do not only affect ourselves but the communal world we live in. I want to love and live like every day could be my last day. Breath after all is a gift. In my view freedom of choice was and still is the greatest gift God gave us to exercise during this life.
Through every decision we solidify ourselves in the choices we make. What do I mean by this? What first start out as a choice later almost becomes automatic behaviour that we no longer choose. Ask most guys suffering from bad habits and addictions if what I say is true: to re-program your brain is very difficult. We tend to become the choices we make. Our character is an externalisation of our choices.
Think about it. You can tell a lot about a person and what is going on on the inside of that person by looking at their dress, their environment, their preferences, their way of life and the choices they make. We live out who we truly are on the inside. It can be seen in our eyes, our home, our garden, the condition of our car and the state of our affairs. Our mind truly is like a computer and what you program it with (put into it) is what you will get out of it. I have realised the importance of screening what goes into my mind. People try to make choices for us. The media tells us how to dress, what to think, what to eat, it even dictates our behaviour. I don’t know about you but I don’t like being told ‘to fit the mold’. I like to make my own choices thank you very much. I don’t like being brainwashed into thinking a certain way by the media, the masses, the music industry or even myself. That’s why we are in need of someones opinion that gets the bigger picture. If I am going to teach my mind new commands, it’s best to start with the first ten. I think that’s why any product from a manufacturer comes with a manual.
I recently concluded that we all have an internal moral grid. A sense of right and wrong. It's wishful thinking to say morality is a matter of preference. Take a person with that point of view and cut them off at an intersection and you have committed a grave offence! If we view a story on the news of an innocent child being abducted by a pedofile abused and killed, we all feel a great sense of injustice have occurred. Our sense of moral ethics are built into us. We can all agree to it to some extent though there might be minor variations. There are also a degree of acceptance and tolerance but a distinct line exist that if crossed will make anyone see red. For instance we can tolerate someone who looses his temper because the taxi in front of him is endangering the lives of innocent people but will refuse to accept that a serial killer’s behaviour is acceptable. In cases such as these something inside us screams for fairness and retribution. We demand justice.
Whether it affects us directly or indirectly. Whether we believe in the Bible or not, its framework stretches through our conscience and consciousness.
Another interesting concept I recently had to examine is the extent and effect of our freedom of choice. God sacrificed a part of His control and power by handing it to us to direct and rule over our own lives. He’s not responsible for the choices we make, neither can He be blamed for the consequences of our choices, but in all fairness He did warn us of the consequences. It seems freedom of choice is essential for love to be free. No one of us want to force someone to love us. We want them to choose it out of their own free will, then alone does love mean anything. The same with God – He could’ve chosen for us to be mindless, heartless, soulless robots, that would always make the right decisions, but we would never be able to choose love nor be capable of it.
In order to choose love, a choice must exist for love to be free. This is the greatest priority of God and His plan for the universe: Love. This concept is explained in Dr. Gregory Boyd’s book ‘Letters for a Skeptic’. Freedom of choice cannot exist without the possibility to either choose goodness (love) or evil (hate). He compares it to the three sides of a pyramid that must co-exist. If you really think about it, every choice we make in live boils down to this. We either make a decision that will have goodness or love as consequence or we direct our energy and freedom of choice to choose evil or a choice fueled in hate. Using our energy to choose and utilise this freedom of choice is what it means to be human. Trying not to choose anything, I dare you, you will quickly learn that your nature will rage in protest and an internal conflict will commence until you make your choice. It makes me think of the popular poem “The Road Not Taken.” We stand in a forest and we see two roads (two choices), the end result of our choices is not clear. We walk blindly in darkness. The author of this poem explains that he choose the road not taken by the majority of travelers. In other words, he chose the unpopular road known for its difficulty and that to him “have made all the difference”. The right choice is not always the easy choice. In fact expect it to be the impossible choice. The one we are most unwilling to make.