THE ONLY RIGHT CHOICE IN LIFE

By

Bill Cottringer

“Life is about choices. Some we regret, some we’re proud of. Some will haunt us forever. 'Black Rain' was very much about choices. The message - we are what we chose to be.” ~Graham Brown.

     “Oh no,” sneered a cynical, untrusting disbeliever, “not another one of these cheap half-truths imposed on me, when I didn’t even ask for it.” “I am sorry,” replied the optimistic, trusting believer, “I am just offering something for you  to consider, which would prevent most problems in life, especially the ones that perplex you most. This involves how to have good relationships. Now isn’t this a generous offer you can’t refuse?”

     John and Mary don’t have much in common in their marriage, except they know what the hedgehog knows, which the fox doesn’t—how to thrive alive without running for your life. What they know is how to avoid the main cause of relationship failures—being unhappy about the unsettling discomfort of perceiving yourself being unfairly over-controlled by the other person.

     So, this couple has learned to become very sensitive to this control factor, having agreed on the very few things that may in fact need some kind of control imposed by the other person. We can confidently predict that John and Mary will remain happily married for a long time, based on their unconditional love and acceptance of most things about each other, with only a few mutually agreed-upon lines drawn in the sand as non-negotiable.

    Consider putting aside your basic belief, learned from your reading and experiences, as to how life was designed to operate. Alert: This fundamental belief may very well be based on a faulty paradigm that has been sacredly accepted, without questioning from the beginning of life—that there is a sure right and wrong—with the addition that you have to be externally controlled in order to make the right choices. This determinism of your free will is conditioned by being rewarded when you make the right choice and punished when you make the wrong one, all against the imposed external standards of right and wrong.

   So, the only right choice in life is to choose to not believe this imposed nonsense that has no real validity, only for those who don’t trust life or people’s ability to make right choices using their own internal compass. But why in the world would you be remotely interested in discarding such a widely accepted view of life? 

     Who am I to propose you give up believing in something that all your life experiences proclaim as true ? I can only hide behind Stephen Covey’s very wise admonition about not waiting until you get to the top rung of your ladder to find out you have placed it against the wrong building. That is a very distressing moment that will be hard to overcome.

     Sometimes it is helpful to go back until you can arrive at a point of consensus, at which opposite perspectives first appeared. Can we agree upon this possibility—that there are a few things in life that are inherently and undeniably bad—like war, child abuse, unprovoked assault, bullying, killing in the name of religion, terrorism, and the like—but that most other rights and wrongs are externally imposed on us with our passive, unquestioning assent? From here, it is easy to spot the right choice-maker—internal within yourslelf, rejecting the external propaganda that is so popular, yet untrue and really unverified.

     I suspect our brains value our internal compass more that the one imposed on us externally. It is much like our allegiance to external validation of success—money, wealth, power, achievments, happiness, contentment and peace of mind as perceived by others, fame, influence and all those things we normally chase after, but somehow always end up empty-handed.

    At this point I am realizing things are getting too abstract here, so lets bring it home to a common experience that disturbs us all, because we have all been in relationships where this external control daunts us—whether as child or parent, student of teacher, athlete or coach, husband or wife, employee or employer or any of these similar situations. Whenever we perceive our destiny being controlled by someone else, it doesn’t sit very well with ourself as to how things should and could be. 

     We have all been controlled—fairly or unfairly, intentionally or unintentionally—in our relationships. And it doesn’t feel good at all. But sometimes the choices about reacting to being controlled put you between a rock and hard place, trying to decide between the worst of two evils. And worse yet, too often either choice already comes with some form of puniushment that has already been predetermined. That is what is meant by the myth of the free will. You don’t exercise free will until you escape from the external control conditioning that has us locked into a vicious circle with no way out, other than to finally just choose to step out.

     Why do we all willingly participate in this control game with no winners? Maybe because that is all we know until someone we trust offers a different alternative? Personally I think the arts, and movies especially, have been trying to tell us to stop this nonsense in a variety of ways, with only a few results. The academy award this year for best picture--“The Shape of Water”—is one that succeeded in my mind. If you haven’t seen this movie, it will graphically represent the main idea I am trying to get across here—that the definition of right and wrong, has to be decided internally person by person, until we have enough results to validate what we chose to believe in as being the best choice we can make.

   Regardless of which side of the fence you are on in personal and work rleationships, here are some good questions worth asking:

·         Why do I want to control the other person when I can’t even control my ownself that well?

·         How am I communicating what I want to control about the other person?

·         Are my intentions honorable—is what I am asking for legitimate?

·         How do I react, when my efforts to control others doesn’t work

·         How open am I to admitting I may have placed my ladder against the worng building?

At the end of the day, we are all after the same thing—happiness. Maybe if we focus more on what we are doing with the choices we are making to be happy, we would have more of it. Or more importantly, should our choices be based more on listening to our internal compass as opposed to the imposed, external one by which we are over-controlled?

“I can't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.” ~Jimmy Dean.