We all make choices
We all must make choices, life doesn’t exactly feel like a train track where the best route is always laid out in front of us.
Sometimes those choices are small, “Do I have a smoothie or toast for breakfast” sometimes they’re bigger (I think back to the long list of elective units I get to choose from for the semester).
The bigger the change to the future based on the current decision the larger the weight of the choice in the current moment. Deterministic thought concludes that we don’t really make those choices, we were always going to make the decision we have because of our past, our nature, we are led to believe that we have a choice but really, I was in fact always going to choose to skip breakfast and just choose another psychology elective.
Even those big decisions we make, the ones we are wishy washy about, we wrack our brains, change our minds, chop and change before landing on a solid answer, you know the big decisions I mean right? The ones were the basis of your reality hangs on the answer to a dichotomous question, everything is completely different one way, and you go on to live in another world should you choose the opposite. You can watch your potential future change before your minds eye as you calculate each outcome, its consequences, the good and the bad.
Determinism can go fuck itself when it comes to these kind of choices, there is no feeling of “I was always going to choose this way” because the power of choice is just that – it’s the power to decide what future reality you want to go into, maybe with smaller questions, the smoothie or the toast questions of our day to day lives are controlled by our innate predetermined decisions but these large life changing decisions, they feel different. There’s conscious effort, you’re not being led one way or the other by the hundred versions of yourself all wanting their own unique needs to be met, no you’re in complete control and this decision means everything.
Decisions like this are never easy, you can’t see into the future, you can’t even see into tomorrow, your heart can split into two, and you’ll never truly know if you picked the right path. Choices, choices, choices. You can always wonder, but you can never know, you can keep on the fence but maybe then you lose all opportunity to have any kind of say it what happens in your life.
No, the fence isn’t the place to be, take control, it’s your life, don’t let other people decide for you. take control.
But how does that help when each path leads into such different realities?
It doesn’t help at all.
All that helps is making your decision, making it yours, and being true to it, this is reality, whether you chose it, or it was always what was going to happen because of your wiring and circumstance, it doesn’t matter. Own it, the time for being wishy washy isn’t now, it was for then no matter how big or small the choice, sometimes toast is perfect.