How often haven't you heard someone say: "I have no choice! I have to do this!" I often think about the radical stance behind this statement, how limited it really sounds, and how much it says about the person saying it. In fact, we almost always have a choice. We may not always consider the options attractive, but a choice is usually available.
Especially when we get to the area of living circumstances, I often wonder if the people who claim that they have no choice really believe themselves. There are, for instance, those people who live in a small town, can't find a job, feel trapped and unhappy in their current living circumstances, and complain endlessly about their plight, but still don't consider the option of moving to another town, city, county, or state. Why? Because they are more trapped by their fear and unwillingness to change their lives, than their lack of choices: fear for the unknown, and fear to be even worse off than they are at the moment, combined with a deep rooted and often carefully hidden attachment to the current situation, which they consider their comfort zone regardless of how bad it may seem.
There are people who stay in bad relationships, because their religion, culture, or pride withholds them from stepping out of it. They feel that they have no choice, because they would otherwise become an outcast or lose some privileges which they consider important. These people often find tons of reasons to rationalize their assertions of not having a choice.
On the other hand, there are also people who, for the same reasons as mentioned above, forego better options. They may, for instance, forego a good relationship with a potential partner, because the person they feel attracted to, does not belong to their affiliate group, and choosing for that person might lead to their dismissal.
Then there are those millions of people who are stuck in unfulfilling jobs, and hate every morning when they have to get ready for work. Yet, year after year they stay where they are, offering numerous reasons why they cannot leave the job: it pays the bills, there are dependents, the company is prestigious, they are too tired to look for something else, the economy is bad, there are too many other things that demand their attention at the moment, and so on. So, they stay miserable, and postpone using their gift of making a choice, because this gift also requires courage.
Yet, if we think of it, everything that happens to us is ultimately a result of choices we once made. If we are in a lousy job, it is most likely that we once applied for it. If we are in a bad relationship, we probably once chose to be in it. If we are in a cultural or religious group, we may have been born into it, but in all cases, we have a choice to change matters.
Of course there is always a chance that our choices turn out to be poor and may lead to worse circumstances than the ones we experience at the moment, but we have another gift, which we can apply after making any choice: the gift of undertaking proper action to make the choice work. It is oftentimes not necessarily the choice we make, but what we do after we made the choice, which will determine its value in our lives.
Choice is a precious gift, which we often underutilize.
