I keep thinking about how I have a choice in every moment. You know, we really do have the choice in how we focus. We can choose to focus on things that feel good. Right this instant. Sure, you might not be able to instantly just say “Abracadabra!” and suddenly be in a state of rapturous enlightenment. It’s more gradual than that. You can choose to focus on something that feels a bit better. You have the choice.
I was running this morning and thinking about this sort of thing. I said to myself, “I am running right now, my feet are moving, I’m feeling the cold air and the rain fall on me, I’m hearing the sounds of the birds, and I’m feeling my feet on the ground… And this is literally all that is happening. Nothing from the past is controlling me, or stopping me from making a new choice. I am completely free in this moment.”
So many of the choices we make, especially the unsatisfying ones, are the rote ones from the past. It’s the old behaviors, usually supported by a belief and plenty of memories, that trick us into thinking that we aren’t free to choose something different. And so we spend our present moments in the now acting as if the choices and memories of the past somehow control us, when they do not.
We really are at choice!
This was blowing my mind as I was running. I was thinking to myself about some time in the past when I felt really stupid, or didn’t act in a way that I would have liked. I don’t remember right now what it was, but my brain was using this as some sort of evidence, as if I don’t have any choice now to be different. Yet we can learn from the past! That’s why it’s the past, it’s there in our past when we were younger and presumably not as mature or as wise, and now we can make new choices based on what we now know! Isn’t that the point of growth?
So what’s with this idea that the choices we made long ago, when we were not as wise or not as mature or not as self-aware, somehow limit what we can choose now? It doesn’t make sense.
Obviously, I’m calling myself out here, because this is what I saw myself doing this morning. Then I got present, and I had the realization about how I am always at choice. This gives me hope. I feel optimistic about the prospect of going forward with a new-found experience of choice.
Another thing I noticed was my own mind jumping to a conclusion as if it knows. I had some idea to do something, which I also don’t remember at this moment either, but my mind jumped in and said, “No, you can’t do that! That won’t work.” Yet how does my mind know? I was running on a foot bridge at that moment, that was actually in the present moment, that was reality, but my brain deciding that something can’t work is just a bunch of thinking. How does it know?
How often do we make choices based on the judgments of our brains about things we actually have no idea about? “Oh, I could never learn to play piano,” or “No, I could never make a million dollars,” or “I could never get a date from that guy/girl” or whatever. Yet how do we know?
It seems to me that some of the choice-making apparatus that seems so prevalent is faulty. We are always at choice. No, we can’t predict what will happen if we take a course of action, but we can predict what will happen if we don’t take a course of action: nothing. So often we psyche ourselves out of taking actions based on past-based opinions our brain has, as if it knows.
It seems to me that the key to making great choices is to get present, look at what our choices actually are, ask which choice feels best, and then make that choice. Rather than falling into the trap of “making a choice” when it’s actually some old program in our brain that is doing the thinking for us.