Choice and Change

Another of the reoccurring themes of my sleeping life is a sort of multiple realities thing. I've basically lived out different versions/subconscious projections of what my life looked like if I had made other decisions than the ones that make up my current life. Different school choices, vocational choices, relationship choices, etc. In one I was a lawyer in Chicago with a wife I didn't recognize. In another I was a small town pastor in the Midwest with a familiar female friend as my wife. In another I was an author and single (and angry), and so the list goes. I live in Chicago, Arizona, Australia, Wisconsin, Europe and elsewhere in my dreams, and strangely, I know my way around pretty well in all those places...you know...in my dreams.

I've mentioned before that I think that our choices fall in a sort of "choice cascade." Each time we make a decision, we close off other paths and lives we might have had and open doors for new things and opportunities in our lives. We choose for one thing and against another, and in so doing, we change our lives each and every time we make a choice. There are no insignificant things in this regard--we have no way of knowing at any given time which choices will open or close the most impacting doors and opportunities in the future. In one sense, our lives are like a huge choose-your-own-adventure book, only infinitely more complicated, because at this moment, there are 6.8 billion of these stories going on concurrently, and all the stories, depending on the choices of the participants, are potentially cooperative/interrelated on different levels. If the scope of the ramifications of that statement don't help you to believe in a sovereign, mighty and powerful God, I can't help you.

(Please note that for the sake of this entry I am bracketing the entire discussion of how much our choices are really the volitions of truly free agents and how much God "causes" the things we label our decisions. I don't have time for that discussion tonight!)

Each time I go through one of these dreams and experience another instantiation of what my life could've been, I wake feeling strangely good about my own life. For years and years, I assumed that this meant that I was pretty comfortable with the choices I'd made. I was right. I am comfortable with my life, and compared to the projections in my dreams, my current life, even with all its foibles and struggles, beats those "could-have-beens" by a substantial margin. But I'd only gone half way with the concept.

I don't think anyone would argue the logic of the choice cascade I mentioned above. I don't think that anyone would argue that if you imagine all the possible scenarios for what your life could've been, and you're happy with it the way it is, that you're probably a pretty contented person (I am.) But there's something else. These two things are intimately related: choice and change. Each choice we make causes a change in the world around us--in other people, in our circumstances, in our attitude. We choose, and the world around us changes. But that's not all: Our choices change us. You are (or soon will be) what you choose. It should come as no surprise at all that the person I've become as a result of my choices prefers my current life to the other options. The choices that led to this point are based on premises and values that prove this life was the one I wanted. The choices we make throughout our lives are first and foremost statements of ultimate value, apart from what we might hope to claim about ourselves. They are the proof of what we really are and what we really believe. Those choices subsequently lead to a life: relationships, hobbies, values, attitudes, and so on, which reflect those values. The choices themselves, whether we make them knowingly or unwittingly, change our view of the world we live in. It shouldn't shock anyone that this version of me--the one who made the choices that led to this life--is happy with the life he's chosen. It would be an unhappy world (and unfortunately is for so many people) where they don't like the life they've chosen, tantamount to saying, "I hate the truest parts of myself--the parts that made this life mine."

Listening to advocates for the poor gives us proof of the validity this concept: they frequently talk about a culture or mindset of poverty which makes poverty in future generations more difficult to overcome. In other words, the choices that people are forced to make because of poverty change people so that they value things differently than those who are not faced with poverty. This mindset/attitude changes those who adopt it so that even if their socio-economic status changes, they are still predisposed to poverty. Money trouble creates poverty. But money alone won't solve the problem for people who only know poverty.

There is another prominent example in America today. All you need do is find a survivor of the Great Depression. People who lived through that period have a unique view of the longterm usefulness of things. My two paternal grandparents, neither still living, kept everything because, I suspect, they wished during the Depression they hadn't treated their pre-Depression possessions so frivolously. When we cleaned out their house after my grandmother passed, we found buckets of rusty nails--pulled from projects after they were done being used. My grandfather straightened them and wouldn't let my grandma throw them away because "they were perfectly good." Their circumstances and the choices they were forced to make changed them for their future. My grandparents weren't bad off--they just remembered not having and the choices it forced them to make and they wished to not be in that position again, which necessitated other choices for them about what was trash and what wasn't. Holocaust survivors are another group whose decisions have changed them. Other examples are everywhere.

I'm sure some people think this thing I've just spilled all these words writing about is pretty obvious. Sure, we make decisions, but those decisions also change our lives and our attitudes. Duh.

Not so fast.

If it is so obvious, why don't we give greater importance to the way we make decisions? I know many people who make huge life decisions with no more thought than just doing it in the spur of the moment. That's a frivolous and irresponsible way to live a life. I know I get criticized for not being spontaneous enough, but there are some things which should NOT be done spontaneously. I think often times this "free spirit" mentality is just another label for a far less good sounding word: sloth. We're simply too lazy or too daunted to take our decisions for what they really are. Fear gains us nothing here. We need to know what we are, and, knowing that, we choose based on what we believe. This knowledge should then give us boldness and confidence to act.

The first step in having a life you'll love tomorrow, or next week, or next year, or in thirty years is to figure out what is truest about you. What do you believe about the world? How did you come to those beliefs? Why do you choose the things you do? In this step, it is important to recognize that you don't gain any points for deluding yourself. If you keep making a choice that is against what you think you want, you need to ask yourself some hard questions. If you're shortcircuiting what you think you value, you have to either change your physical behavior to match your intellectual values, or vice versa.

The second step in having a life you'll love is to handle every decision in your life in a way that is consistent with your beliefs. Once you know what you think, evaluate the options you have for choices, and then pick the one that is the closest to what you actually think. This is so obvious it should be vaguely insulting, but I'm consistently flabbergasted by people who claim to believe something, and then either ignore their beliefs at the moment when they would demonstrate them or act in a way that is contrary to what they say they believe. Let me break the secret: if you repeatedly ignore or violate your beliefs, you're wrong about what you think you believe. Your actions will always tell the truth about what you really think.

So here's the question we all need to ask ourselves on a regular basis: In light of what I really believe, which is proven by what I repeatedly choose, what do I do in this moment or situation that most honors my most deeply held convictions?

When we answer that question, the rest is simple: just do that thing.

We're all changing. What are you changing into?