I’ve recently returned to this idea of choices.

I would love to integrate choices more into my daily thinking, beyond the reflective period in the morning where I give a shit about this kind of stuff. It’s a work in progress.

I was thinking about the lineage a bit more of when this became a profound insight for me; a moment of clarity. I think it was reading Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankel, in 2015. What I took from it: You always have a choice in how you respond to the circumstances you are given. 

That’s all you have. Even if something or someone else has taken everything away from you, that is what you are left with.

And he was right. The world beyond my mind is circumstance, including my body. But in my mind, I have the capability to choose. I have agency. In fact, I am always choosing. I’m constantly in the present tense of the verb ‘to choose’. Right now I’m choosing. This is the only thing I can truly control in this moment. It’s inescapable. I’m choosing because I can only ever be (physically with my body and my mind in my body) in one place at one time. It’s zero-sum. Binary. I’m either doing x or not doing x. Therefore, every moment matters. 

And that’s why awareness is so important to me. Whether I am aware or not, I’m still choosing. If I’m aware of the choosing, then I give myself a fighting chance of making a choice that is ‘right’ in my eyes. I can be intentional in my choosing. And look, I’m no saint, I spend a lot of time unaware of my choosing, or I am aware but I still make the wrong choice. That’s just the way it goes. It’s a numbers game though. The more time I can be aware, the more chance I have of catching my choosing, the more chance I have of making the ‘right’ choice.