Choice

With the way words are, sometimes the meanings get a little fuzzy. For this post, I’ll explain the true definition of today’s topic. Choice is derived from it’s “home” word choose. Choose originates from before the year 1000, and comes from the Greek geúesthai, to enjoy, and the Latin gustāre, to taste. In my opinion, that’s really pretty cool. As a young child, I would always love to taste the sugar filled treats that would be baked for birthdays or just because around the house. Those tastes, I can still remember to this day, and it’s interesting to note that not everyone tastes the same way. We all have different tastest buds just like how we all have our own specific choices.

Another term that is similar to choice, is agent, which is defined as a person or thing that acts or has the power to act. It’s origin comes from the Latin stem of agēns, present participle, doing, equivalent to ag- root of agere to do + -ent. Amongst the religious communities, there seems to only be one that discusses the ability the choose and where it came from. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, discuss the ability to choose as the gift of agency, as a part of the Plan of Salvation. This Plan was organized in a Grand Council of Heaven, which discussed a progressionary plan to ultimately become closer to being like God. Another part of that plan, was to receive a physical body and spend our time on Earth with the ability to choose for ourselves. Having a physical body allows us to be able to make choices and experience the “tastes” of existence.

Choices are pretty powerful, from a large scale or small. Some choices can be so insignificantly small that we don’t even notice them. When we stop noticing our behaviors, that’s when we can really start down the path of complacency and lack in productivity. Other kinds of choices, can “trap” us into a continuous routine that slowly takes away our ability to choose. As an example, an addictive thing like alcohol, drugs, or other substances take control over our ability to choose by ultimately making our choice for us. When other objects make influences our choices in such a way, we no longer have an independent choice but a manipulated one. How many people have to have a coffee in the morning? How many people need to take a smoke break? What other things control our decision making? Food for thought.

When you break things down into individual pieces, a choice is a lot like a droplet of water. As the single drop falls into existence you can see that when it meets it’s destination, it causes ripples or affects what it comes in contact with. In comparison with the ripples of the water, when we make a choice the ripples are the consequences of those choices entering existence. We cannot control the consequences of our actions and behaviors. Jordan B. Peterson said, “You are going to pay a price for everything you do and everything you do not do. You do not get to choose to not pay a price. You get to choose with poison you are going to take. That’s it.” In correlation with that, the consequences of our choices and the consequences of others choices will never be controlled or expected. No matter if we are the cause or others are the cause, we must “pay the price” because that is the end or the result.

For me this has caused some stress, because in my young adult mind, I would constantly try to analyze and figure out how my choices would affect others. I would try to figure out the consequences before they would even occur. You could say that is just a form of observation, but to me at the time it ‘made my brain hurt’ and I would consider myself very introverted because of all the time I chose to spend analyzing instead of actually doing things with my fellow peers and friends. I think I started developing this type of behavior around the age of ten and it has continued until today. Throughout that amount of time, I’ve been able to experience the ups and downs of over analyzing and under analyzing and have lived the consequences of both. Because of this, I have been able to observe some patterns and factors that I feel dictate our choices: structure is crucial, self awareness, and allowing consequences.

Structure is Crucial

Going back to the water droplet example, water or liquids will scientifically take the shape of whatever container they are placed in. That “container” is the structure. Structure is so vitally important when it comes to choices, because that is what creates the order or makes the choice “make sense” in that circumstance. Choices that are made with out any structure are chaos. There aren’t very many real life examples that I could give you of a chaotic choice, because we (as human beings) normally have structures that help us avoid chaos. We physically have needs, we are built with a brain who have survivalist functions that allows us to structurally choose behaviors that help alleviate those needs. When any structure start becoming defective for any number of reasons, age, weakness, lack of upkeep, behaviors become more and more uncontrolled and eventually need to be remedied. There are many different kinds of structures in life today, and I plan on writing about a few of them in more depth in future blog post. Think about which structures you’ve noticed in your own life, they could be anything from family, beliefs, everyday schedule etc.

I would say that the prominent structures in my life focused primarily around my family and the local environments in Utah. Utah, which was previously posted, has a fairly dense population of religiously structured members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and was also, for the most part, American Caucasian culturally. Since becoming an adult and becoming more autonomous and self efficient, those environments have changed many times and my structures aren’t viewed so much as primarily religious or primarily Caucasian but as a combination of those things and more structurally.

Self Awareness

Like I mentioned, I spent a lot of time thinking and analyzing the consequences of my actions. One of the consequences of doing that, was that I became very self aware of my circumstances in those specific moments. I would constantly check around the area I was in, as if to not be in the way or cause a problem for others while walking down a hallway at school, or by not interrupting a fellow classmate or teacher during class unless under reasonable circumstances. For anything new, like a movie, TV show, or event I wouldn’t ever disrupt the current or undergoing event so I would be able to absorb the experience to then either use for further discussions or to just have as a personal taste. If I would see an individual or individuals doing or participating in anything, I would simply wait until it was an opportune time to ask questions of join along. Of course this didn’t happen straight out of the gate for me, I’ve had my fair share of bumped shoulders, scoldings for interrupting, or being snapped at during a movie. Those experiences helped deepen my understanding of self awareness and has even led me to understanding how to better know my awareness on the inside, my feelings and thoughts. I’m definitely no expert in those things or in the principles of self awareness, but I do know that if everyone was more aware of what they are choosing to do, no matter how insignificant we would all benefit. Could you imagine a world where EVERYONE knows and is paying attention to their surroundings when they drive? Or when we all go grocery shopping? Or maybe even when we are considering others during a virus epidemic? We can even go a step further, what would the world be like if everyone was so self aware how many lives would still be with us right now? Imagine the potential of self awareness. Its up to all of us to decide to be more aware.

Accepting Consequences

This idea has probably had the most impact on me personally. I remember experiencing the principle of ‘eye for and eye and tooth for a tooth’ quite a lot within my environments and social groups. Even nowadays people take offense to anything you can imagine for their own personal reasons. As I started to observe how peoples emotions influenced their decision making and behaviors, I realized that no matter what I did, I could never control someone else’s emotions but I would know, by observing, what to do to invite those emotions into the situation. I could figure out someones “buttons” and experiment with my choices on what they would do. Overtime, I started to think about my own emotions and what things invited them to the forefront. I don’t remember a specific occurrence, but I remember being in a heated situation where my temper was flaring and so was someone else’s. I remember thinking to myself, why am I upset? Then my brain went to work breaking down the situation to try and figure out why. Eventually, after the situation passed on, I figured that I had made the choice to be mad, the other individual couldn’t control my emotions, only I could. The only person that can control my decisions, is me. With the right accountability, that’s true for many people. No one, but you, can control your feelings. You may feel your emotions being to flare when someone else does something to you or influences you some other way, and you may blame them for “making you” feel those things, but in reality….it’s up to you, no matter how natural or uncontrollable your feelings seem. Your feelings come from you, and your understandings. Just like me, you can map out where and why you feel the way that you do. Mindfulness of your actions can allow this observance, and with a little mixture of time you can figure it out.

So as a conclusion, a goal that I had set for myself was to no matter what, choose the better emotion. If another person was choosing to be malicious or have ill intent towards me, I would still have the choice to treat them with respect. Others may have very different or passionate opinions about certain things that I won’t agree with, but I don’t need to berate or slander them I can let them just be who they are and have the opinions they have. Funny enough, I guess my goal was really the “Golden Rule” or do to others as you would want them to treat you, but for me how they treated me never mattered. I do slip up from time to time, and I know I’m not perfect, but just know that I will share what I feel like sharing and will respect any and all opinions that come my way. I’ll ask questions to help my understanding and explain my insights to anyone who has a question.

In a comfortable home, in the city of West Jordan Utah, there is a quote that has forever changed my perception and really summarizes one of the many purposes of choices and decision making. In my parents upstairs bathroom there is a picture framed image of two young children fishing with the quote by Peter De Vris that I will share in the image below. May we all try to consider this as we do our best to do a little better with our choices. Thanks for Reading!