The life we choose?

Have you ever been told that you are a product of your own decisions? Probably. I know I certainly have. But like, most of us are aware that while this statement may be true, it has to be balanced with other factors like your upbringing, environment, and what is usually described as genetic predisposition.

I held those factors in some sort or balance from college to…well, somewhat recently. But it was in recent years…like within the last year or two that I started to give more credence to choices (making decisions) over upbringing or predisposition. Something that I just now considered while writing this is that upbringing and genetic predisposition are essentially constant, or at least things we can’t change, for the most part because they occurred in the past. But making decisions is always something we can do now to change what will happen in the future.

Still, I’ve felt recently that upbringing and predisposition have a certain subtle power that work quietly while we delude ourselves into thinking we have the power to make whatever choices we want in life. I mean, sure we can make decisions, but the question is, why do we make the decisions we make?

I was taking the bus up to Seattle from Tacoma, and I sat next to this guy with a close haircut and a big knapsack. (Tacoma has a lot of people in the military). He asked me how far Seattle is and where the train station is. I told him it takes about 45 minutes and that I’d be riding past the train station so I’d let him know which stop to get off at.

I suppose that could have been the end of our conversation, but I was curious so I asked him if he’d just returned from overseas or something. As it turned out, he’d just been released from prison on a minor offense. And this day was the first day of freedom he’d had in…I think 52 months.

The experience he had influenced his perspective quite a bit. And one of the realizations he’d had was similar to one I’d had in the past year – that life is what we make of it and it’s up to us to decide how we look at things. He said, “This bus ride, for example…it sucks. But if this is the worst thing in my life right now, it isn’t that bad.” (He’d been riding buses all morning. This was his third transfer.)

It seemed from talking with him that his experience had caused him to see things differently and make new decisions in his life. However, I also found from talking with him more, that his recent sentence was not his first. He’d been in prison before. With that history, I started to wonder if he really was going to do anything differently in his life or if he’d end up right back where he was. And if he did, then why, if he’d learned from the experience before.

So I started to wonder about the decisions I’ve made in my life and why I’ve made them. Why I do things the way I do. And the answer is…I don’t know.

At the end of Season 1 and going into Season 2, you may recall that I started to feel a sense of power, of control of my life. That I could do what I wanted. And I had considered the logic or justification for my decisions. But until recently, I neglected to consider why I see things the way I do in the first place. And now that I’m considering changing course and doing things differently, I’m suddenly finding the barriers of my upbringing and predisposition to be much stronger than I realized…which is causing me now to feel I’ve trapped myself. It’s like, I’ve seen life a certain way and have done things a certain way for so long, it feels like I’m stuck.

Why am I so focused on what I do and where I want to go? Why am I so inflexible? Why am I patient? Am I making decisions to be this way or am I just doing what comes naturally to me? If someone tells me that I should be more flexible or to live for the moment, aren’t they just telling me what comes naturally for them? Couldn’t I turn around to them and say that they should be more patient and see things through, and work in the direction they want to go and not to lose focus? And if they tried that, could they do it?

Or would they find, as I have, that they are stuck in the life they’re living? That it’s not fate or predestination we’re living, but that we seem to be prone to make the decisions we make.

It’s difficult for me to accept this because I’ve seen people make life-changing decisions so I believe…well, not just believe, I know it’s possible. But you have to really want it. Although, I think sometimes, experiences in our life can force us to change. Like when you hit a rock.

Well, I hope that guy I talked to on the bus can make the changes in the life he wants. And I hope that I can, too.