No Choice

The chamiso is blooming so I took a Benadryl before bed last night to fend off allergies and fell asleep with my headphones on and podcasts playing.  I did not dream, or recall my dreams, but two sentences lit up my brain in the night.

I thought I heard Thomas Merton – but who knows for sure - while giving a talk about Sufism, Catholicism, and mysticism - say something like:

 “I hardly care about my own choices why should I care about what other people choose?”

Hmm. I thought, as I drifted back to sleep:

“What if our choices are actually the least important thing about us?”

A good while later, I woke again to the voice of Ram Dass piped into my headphones saying something like this:

“So, make whatever choices you want and don’t worry too much about it. The important thing is what we work out it as it all unfolds.”  

There are a million ways that life on this earth restricts our choices. We are constrained by economics, by politics, by history, environment, and opportunity, by social pressure, cultural forces, and conditioning. The world begins pruning our possibilities the moment we are born. Some of our external parameters are malleable, surmountable. Some are not.

And then there are the limits that are specific to us, to our neurology and our embodiment. We are born with dispositions, with constitutions and susceptibilities. And again, some of these are malleable, surmountable, and some of these are fixed.

Dyscalculia assured that I would not become a physicist, an astronomer, a physician, or a mathematician, as it prevented me from ever progressing beyond simple arithmetic or ever memorizing my multiplication tables.

But even beyond the hard external and embodied limitations that shape our fates, it seems to me, we choose far less about our lives than most of us imagine.

There is a whole realm of things we are perfectly capable of, that we cannot bring ourselves to do, even if we think we should, even if we imagine it may offer us some advantage.

Try forcing yourself to fall in love.

Viktor Frankl says that when all other freedoms have been stripped away, the only choice that remains is how we will respond to our fates. And this seems to me to be along the thread that Thomas Merton to Ram Dass whispered into my ears in the night.

Our choices are less interesting than how we respond to whatever happens after choosing - in the rare instances when we have any choice at all.

And even when we do, perhaps the story unfolds as it must no matter what we choose.

In the 1970’s my father’s household was partial to contemporary paraphrasings of the Bible and on the sparse bookshelf were multiple paperback copies of a New Testament titled “The Good News for Modern Man” In this “translation” at the Last Supper (John 13: 27), Jesus turns to Judas and says:

“Hurry and do what you must.”

What he must? 

Those words (coupled with way too many hours spent listening to Jesus Christ Superstar) banged up against the notions of choice and free will and sin that my father’s church tried to instill in me.

Did Judas have a choice?  Could he really have changed the whole story and the history of the whole world by going home after dinner and taking a nap instead? Would this alternate Christ story tell of Jesus in his old age? Or would the terrible cup just pass itself back to him through some other route?

I think of the things that feel utterly impossible for me, even if they are rationally possible. I wonder about the internal blocks and voids, and what is happening when I am incapable of imagining through to new possibilities, when I can see no way from here to there. Where the thought of initiating action, even a superficially desirable or advantageous one, makes me feel enervated, all energy drained from my body. My vison and motivation, completely sucked out of my system.

“I’ve got zero mojo for this.”  I say to myself.

Is that a choice? Or a psychological fact?

I have had the opposite experience as well. Projects that come to me like a vision, that I did not consciously want to take on. But they rose up from inside of me like a geyser, blowing a hole in my conscious resistances.

“It will be pointless. Or it will be too much work. It will exhaust me. It will go nowhere. Or it will go places I don’t want to go…. But still,” - the vision transforms into a leading – “If I just X or Y or Z it could totally come together…”  

The leading sometimes consolidates into a calling: “This absolutely has to be done, and even though I don’t want to, I see that I am the one to do it.”

Is this choice?

It doesn’t feel like it. These feel like internal mandates as solid as concrete barriers channeling my energies in one direction and blocking them in another.

I usually do not do what I must not, and I mostly do what I must.

And so do most people, I think. Whether they realize it or not.

They fall in love with someone terrible for them. They cannot bring themselves to leave a job they hate. They cannot (yet) imagine speaking up for themselves or doing something they have told themselves they must not. They think they must care for their abusive parents or alternately they feel they have to estrange themselves from toxic ones. They feel that having children is non-negotiable, or that terminating an unwanted pregnancy is essential to preserve their survival.

We call many things choice that we don’t experience as choice at all. The realm of free will shrinks considerably when we consider all the compulsions, prohibitions, obligations, values, all the fears, phobias, hungers, and instincts that lurk out of reach of consciousness and drive our behavior. We may rationalize the process simultaneously or afterwards to shore up the illusion of choice but mostly we do not know why we do what we do.

“I couldn’t live with myself if I did X (or didn’t do Y)”

“I had no choice.”

“I just knew that I had to.”

This is the language of instinctive imperative. Without option.

“What else could I do?” people say when such instinctive mandates rise up.

Even writing this essay happened without my choosing. I sat down this morning to jot down these half-heard podcast dream thoughts and I found myself coming back to my journal again in the odd quiet moments and at the end of the day – until this happened.

We do what we must.

Maybe how we regard and consider these mandates is more interesting than our choices.

Maybe it is more important to ride the ride- even if we are strapped in tightly and our range of motion more constricted than we realized - while we hold some compassion for ourselves and others in the face of all we cannot choose.