Insight #348:
Do you know what I like about living in a (relatively) free country? I get to make my own choices. Every day. Do you know what I don’t like about living in a (relatively) free country? I must make choices. Every day.
That’s my burden for being free. I must take responsibility for myself by making decisions that help me cope with this freedom to choose.
Now that I am wise to the burden of freedom, I see how freedom fathers too many dreams, which time relentlessly kills. In my case, I once wanted to be a yachtsman. Maybe a pilot. Or an engineer. Why not an architect? An artist! The list goes on.
What happened?
Time happened. As the years added up, my options subtracted. I’m now too old to be those other people. I’m stuck with me as I am today. As is.
What happened?
Choices happened. I might not have chosen my parents, the circumstances of my birth. But today I can see how my choices have carried me from there to here.
I now know that this freedom to choose has boundaries and limits. Life, in a (relatively) free country, gives us many options to dream about. But life then gives us nudges and hints about what to choose. The more we resist what life has in mind for us, the harder the nudges, the louder the hints.
What if we stubbornly ignore the nudges and hints? Then the fewer our options.
Once I thought my choices would lionize me. But the longer this nudging goes on, and the fewer my options, the more I am quietly defined by what I did not choose, did not do, did not become.
Today, having run out of options, I’m left with another choice. To mope about who I might have been. Or to be who I am now.
And, of course, to take the blame.
Or the credit.
Welcome to my side of the nonsense divide.
. . .