Thursday, July 5, 2018

Deciding


Are you in a prison 
or
 are you in a playhouse
or
both?

The process of shaping one’s life never seems to stop. Change goes on, with or without us. We get to have some input into this inexorable dance, but it isn’t large and definitive. Mostly, it’s after the fact, lame, and fairly poorly thought out. Still, no factor plays as large a role in how we shape ourselves as the choices we make. Deciding exercises the autonomy that is us — it shapes how we live, and who we are. It is so important, and so rarely examined. I wonder why? Perhaps, this writing meditation will shed some light on this soul-bending phenomenon.

I think my life is mostly a lucky accident. I’ve been given a lot of credit for what I became during an unbelievable ordeal. The truth of it is, not much courage was required. I could read the writing on the wall, dead or alive — I belonged to Life — about that I had no choice. I still don’t. Life chose for me, I survived briefly. I’m in that interlude now. I get to decide how I play this second chance, and that means that I am once again thrust up against my own attitudes about this existence.

I dwell in crazy possibility. I am, afterall, a radical unlikelyhood. So, for me, this phase of this life, is a free pass. Brain damage and luck have forged a strange passport that gives me free reign, a kind of diplomatic immunity, to be weird, eccentric, and slightly off, without the usual consequences. You see, it’s hard to take what’s left very seriously.

But, I remember the time before my stroke of luck. I was such an upright human, so desperate to learn, to live right, to be one of the reliable ones. My decisions, about myself, and my way of being with others, dripped with  eagerness. I was a mensch wannabee. My decisions followed accordingly. I lived well, in my well-appointed jail cell, locked into my desire for other’s to like and approve of me, and what I’d become.

This is a meditation on choice, and I am struck by the paradox, that I call myself “Lucky” because I had no choice. Life took away all my options, and gave me something I could never have cooked-up. The passport Life gave me at the border is something I never deserved, something I never even imagined. Still, it is carrying me through the provinces I thought I knew, and it is introducing me to the possibilities that I couldn’t see. Being human has become a kind of high bafflement, that defies what I was taught, and asks me to go further.

The truth is I can’t decide. Is being here a gift from some source beyond, or a curse? — a lively mystery tour, or an unfolding nightmare designed to unnerve. It seems schizo-enough to be all of the above. So, here I am, unable to decide, and without a choice about having to decide. So, I’m looking for Life to keep carrying me along despite my decisions. And, I’m getting Life carrying me along, in the way it is, because of my decisions. How’s that for justice? I decide despite myself, and I get to live with the consequences.

I know I’m no clearer about deciding, than I was when I began this inquiry. Deciding seems to have some kind of ephemeral veil — what looks easy and necessary, turns out mysterious and undecipherable. Life seems to hang on my attitudes and beliefs, and then some hitchhiking wonder takes over the wheel.

There’s nothing illuminating in what I’ve written, and maybe that is the greatest asset that this treatise holds.

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