To choose is to risk losing all that you don’t choose—to choose is to lose. But “the art of losing isn’t hard to master,” and when you choose, what do you lose but an unlived life? There are greater risks than losing. Adam Phillips describes the risk of regret, of focusing too much on the fantasy formation of the unchosen: “Indeed, our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live” (xii).
The thought that we could have done differently manifests the mystifying cunning of the concept of choice, and of regret. Could it really have been any different?
To choose is “to take by preference out of all that are available; to select; to take as that which one prefers, or in accordance with one’s free will and preference” (sense 1 OED). It is “to will, to wish, to exercise one’s own pleasure in regard to a matter in which one is a free agent” (sense 3, OED).
Is one a free agent? In the stream of causes in which we’re swept along, could we really have made a different choice? As the streams converge on one moment, no.
And yet… our choices matter, because what we choose to do in this moment enters the stream of causes, as Sam Harris puts it in his argument on free will as an illusion. Free will is an illusion because we are never free; even in the moment of noticing we have the intention to make a choice, we don’t know where that intention came from, and the choice itself is constrained by countless filters, facets, winnowings, limits.
And yet… choosing is freeing because it constructs the self that feels it is a free agent. As Adam Phillips says in the next sentence: “But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are” (xii). When I tell myself I should be doing this instead of that, I free myself from the hurtful implications that I am not ___ enough by saying, “I choose this.” Choice empowers. We feel that we are acting on well-considered reasons, hunches, and yearnings. We feel we’re not driven, not pushed, not compelled, when we choose with intention. We feel we have agency to determine our lives.
I recently made a radical change in my life. For a long time, I stayed suspended, held in a web of thoughts and habits above the crux. Reality arrived and cleared the clouds. I fell onto the crossroads and was forced to choose.
The OED got it wrong. There are no matters “in which one is a free agent.” At least, we’ll never have freedom of choice, and choosing always entails losing and accepting different limitations along with what we’ll gain. Sometimes what we lose, though, is a fantasy.
Winnicott articulates a warning about the unlived fantasy that’s so appealing; he says of one of his patients: “It was clear that she had nostalgia for the certainty of the illness pattern and great anxiety about the uncertainty that goes with the freedom to choose” (43). The uncertainty that goes with the freedom to choose is, of course, most of what we experience as life.
Mindfulness meditation has helped me choose. All of the noticing, all of the slowing down and being present, all of the unhooking of the claws of thoughts and seeing them pass brings a clarity that allows for choice. What posture do I want to hold toward my experience? How do I want to act in this moment? What would be the best choice for my and others’ well-being? When we slow down for being, we can make less reactive, better choices towards our becoming.
At the same time, meditation helps me see there’s no essential me, no I to determine my life.
Me at the chiasmus, crux, crossroads—where am I?
Instead there are conditions, relations, patterns of behavior, habits, automatic thoughts, emotional reactions, autonomic processes, gut-brain communication highways, bacteria, and conscious awareness. Conscious awareness, given attention, can reveal reality as continuous flux and I as a pronoun, a denotation. The word self’s origin was one too. Now it’s an abstract noun that has been described metaphorically as a center of gravity.
From the Buddhist point of view, Bruce Tift explains:
freedom arises from a profound disidentification with any content—good or bad. When our circumstances and experiences are held in the context of open awareness, we are … no longer “inside” the content; rather, we are “witnessing” it within the context of awareness. With that shift in perception, we begin to have a choice about how to relate to our experience. (70)
And:
To free ourselves from our identification with our conditioned history and from our investment in a familiar sense of self, we may need a conscious, embodied relationship with exactly the feelings we’ve dedicated most of our lives to avoiding. (266)
I chose to recognize what my intuitions were telling me. I chose to feel the panic rise from my gut to my face and be calm. I chose to wake up and see the gestalt. I made the right choice, and now I walk the road of reality with memory imprints forming a field of chiastic relations between this one and the other. But I don’t long for that lost unlived life because finally, by choosing, I saw it was not my life. And every choice, especially the big ones, contributes to the ongoing process of the self and ripples out in ramifications that affect the lives of others.
bitter sweet
Choose derives from Old English ceosan, from the Proto-Germanic root keus-, which comes from the proto-Indo-European root *geus- “to taste; to choose.”
How will it taste? You don’t know until you touch it to your tongue, after which you can’t not taste it. To taste is to choose to incorporate something unknown, to make a thing unknown a part of your consciousness, a part of who you are in that moment, a part of your lived life. It’s a risk, but the alternative is to live a life of compulsion.
Quotes are from:
Bishop, Elizabeth, “One Art”
Phillips, Adam, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life, New York: Picador, 2021.
Oxford English Dictionary
Winnicott, D.W., Playing and Reality, New York: Routledge, 2005 (1971).
Tift, Bruce, Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation, Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2015.
Online Etymology Dictionary, choose.