380 days!

Choice

Everything is a choice.  Every event was chosen into being, every life created from choices, every path made by choices.  The forks in the road occur every single second of our lives.  Sometimes we say, that oh we didn't have a choice.  But don't we?  There's just more obvious choices, and choices that wouldn't be worth choosing, but in the end, there is that one that you choose.  Maybe the act of choosing lasts no longer than a split second, our minds just automatically carrying out our choice for us.  Like I could stop typing right here and now and back there a sentence before this, but I'm not done talking so that choice doesn't quite make sense. 

If you know me in real life, you would probably know that my life at home isn't all that jolly or wonderful.  If you've met my family, you would probably think at best that we're weird and somewhat estranged from one another, at worst that we're all just mentally disturbed in various ways and should all be sent to see professionals, separately.  I've complained to my friends about their obsession with perfection and grades, and some of them urge me to rebell.  To do things like get them to sign my schedule sheet then change it to other classes, or just tell them (or from one of my more un-self-concious friends, tell them off), and various other schemes and scenarios.  Yet I wouldn't even think of doing any of them, even after having these ideas handed to me on a plate by my "helpful" friends.  I've even told them, that I just didn't have a choice.  But that's not right is it?

Everyone has a choice, there are choices everywhere, what happens and who we are are just an accumulation of those choices.  I could choose to tell my parents, I'd also have to suffer through the several hours long lectures ranging from calmly loudly speaking to outright screaming.  I could deceive them by changing my classes around, but I don't really mind too much the classes that I'm taking, not enough that I would like to give them an excuse to shout at me.  The point is, even though it feels like I have no choices, I do.  Just no viable ones.  If I was a different person, I would have different choices open to me.  Just like my friends that thought up these ideas for me, they could come up with them because they could think of choosing to act like that.  Without their help, I would not have even thought of them or considered their advice.  They were choices that didn't seem to exist for me.  Even knowing them I still wouldn't choose them, but you know what, I have made some choices.  I made a choice to not choose them.

We think of choices as something we're going to decide and do.  But choices are much more prevalent then that.  Choosing no, of inaction, the thinking that goes on in our heads that we're usually not even aware of, is more important to who we are than making choices to act on.