friday afternoon update! 21: choice turned upside down

 

let’s make a deal

a funny thing happened as i journeyed into my week of want, one of those bifurcations that shows the true meaning of infinity: i foolishly thought that framing questions of “what to do?” around what i want to do, rather than what i should do, or need to do, would somehow simplify my life, like some sort of monty hall let’s make a deal kind of thing:

do you want door number one, door number two, or door number three? need, should, or want?

well, door number three of course. thanks for the prize…see ya later!…what? there’s more?

magic theater: price of admission your mind

yeah, right. once i stepped out into the land of want, all hell broke loose. beginning with the land of what do you want? and then quickly veering into

• the realm of conflicting wants, 
• the plain of difficult choices, and 
• the valley of conflicting desires. 

suddenly i felt a bit like pandora, staring in awe at this rapidly expanding vista of want, of desires and choices to be made. so many different voices all shouting at the same time. so many fingers pointing in so many directions! so many crayons in the box! yikes!

still life with woodpecker

in his seminal 70’s opus still life with woodpecker, the book that made it easy for me to choose a life of smoking and drinking over a life of quiet respectability, the conceit of a novel taking place inside a pack of camel straights allows author tom robbins to introduce us to the idea of the primacy of choice, “the word that no mirror can turn around.”

of course it’s a trick. a mirror will turn the word choice around. and it won’t turn it upside down! which might be even more powerful. (as long as you write it in capital letters, a limitation of my own artistic conceit here in the land of lower case)

this of course is that promethean bargain that makes us human.

so if i steal fire and give it to people i’ll spend eternity having my ever-regenerating liver picked apart by a crow? it’s a deal!

choice! it’s not here to make life easier. if you want easy, go devolve back into a fish! then you will have no choice: you ‘ll just swim about obeying all the laws of nature day in day out.

you wanna be a human? then you gotta make a choice. and then another and another and another. it never stops!

heaven and hell

jean-paul sartre once postulated that “hell is other people”. i’m thinking that hell is actually living a life of choice avoidance, of putting on the blinders and looking the other way whenever there is a choice to be made. wouldn’t want to make a bad one, after all!

and heaven is a state of embracing choice and everything that flows from it. no matter what happens.

of course this is not an easy meal to swallow. it requires responsibility of a different sort than just going to work every day and paying your bills on time. it’s the responsibility of:

• making choices and then embracing the consequences
• looking at how your choices play out in the world
• examining how your choices have given you the life you are living
• making new choices if your old one’s aren’t panning out
• making better choices

it’s the responsibility of abandoning victimhood, of emancipating yourself from mental slavery, as bob marley would say.

it’s all about the embrace

of course it’s not all about anything, and such are the limits of language. for me at least! and yet…given my linguistic shortfalls, it’s all about the embrace! 

• embrace the pain
• embrace the confusion
• embrace the conflict
• embrace the challenge
• embrace the rock in your shoe when you are carrying two paper sacks full of groceries and the ground is soaking wet from rain and it’s another hundred yards to the car and shit! i forgot to get my keys out in the store now i’m going to have to put one of those bags down in the water anyway!

because if you don’t embrace the fallout from your choices then you can’t embrace the fruits of your choices either. it’s one of those better or worse kinda things…like when greg brown sings:

i shoulda married someone,
who likes to camp and fish,
and make love for two days straight,
and you say, “don’t you wish”

choose it or lose it

so that’s my conclusion from my week of want: operate from the realm of desire, and embrace the fruits of your choices. and if you don’t like the fruits of your choices? no matter. try again. choose again. choose better.

Tags: choice, friday afternoon, greg brown, magic theater, motivator, need, pandora, respectability, should, tom robbins, want, woodpecker

If you liked this, you might might like these too:

• friday afternoon update! 24: the “making this up as we go along” edition (10)
• monday morning motivator!: 15, becoming the decider (3)
• friday afternoon update! 17: the next generation (0)