Reflections on choices...

Why does the process of living entail choice-making? Ideally, shouldn't everything be accommodated? Isn't there room for all aspects? But evolution operates through choice. This way; not that. An increasing balanced complexity of unfolding. Thus we are creatures of choice. It's buried in our Biblical myths too. Free will, with a hidden clause: choose the 'right way' or suffer. So we make continual choices based on a wide range of criteria. I can be more of who I am here rather than there: this is a better fit for me; I am more useful here; I can better fulfill my ideals in service of this.

The underside of choice is rejection. Turning away from, shutting down, negating, shaking yourself free of. I leave this for that: that opportunity suits me better than this one- it could give me greater happiness, success, wealth.

We are always considering our choices, hoping they're the right ones, seeing if we can make better ones. People who have definable goals generally achieve more than those who don't. Mulling around 'looking' without knowing what you're looking for usually doesn't produce much of anything. It's better to establish priorities, short and long term goals, to make decisions. By making decisions, we move on. This, not that: whee, I'm on a trajectory...

But there are two problems with this 'mind-set'- the torment of regret over making 'a bad choice,' and being so worried about ramifications, consequences and what might or might not happen that one is unable to make any decisions at all, and so keep treading the same water, running on the same treadmill, arriving where you started from. Indecision as a result of fear is to my mind one of the worst dilemmas of all.

Then we never give ourselves fully to anything. We don't dive deeply, take chances, are absolutely alive to everything life can offer us. Perhaps this is what is known as 'the conventional life.' Taking the road well traveled - after all it seems safer.

Yet we are 'hot-beds of passion.' I've never spoken to a single person my whole life who wasn't simmering with desires, regrets, angers, joys, judgments, emotional memories under their beautiful surfaces. We are fiery beings, powerhouses of energy. All of us. In our happinesses and unhappinesses, our successes and failures, our desires and furies. We're competitive, ever-watchful of each other. Attempting to balance our need to cooperate lovingly and to come out ahead. And always cognizant of our bodies, their appetites, perhaps shaping ourselves through dieting or exercise, trying to hone and contain ourselves...

I'm feeling chatty today, it's very quiet in the middle of the Summer, so a reflective post. While I don't have to make any major life-path decisions currently, whenever I do I seem to choose the wild, tangled, lonely ways, the ones that are full of strange ecstasies and deep heartbreaks, visions and insecurity, finding and losing myself continually along the way. I seek out challenges. Is that why I'm an artist?