YOU’RE THE CHOICE (TRY AND UNDERSTAND IT)

Have you ever felt completely trapped inside your skin. Like there is this intrinsic, inescapable and essential “you” that you’re stuck dealing with until your dead? I’ve always found this a rather frightening concept. We’re born, we grow up and bit by bit we reveal this “us-ness”, carved into us like a chunk of marble being sculpted, according to our genetic make up (nature) and our upbringing and environment (nurture), into what is essentially a person we, as individuals, have had very little control over. It can be an easy and understandable explanation for our characters; if it’s something good (something that we like about ourselves), it feels comforting to know that it is a genuine and accurate aspect of who we are. If it’s something crappy (that we don’t like about ourselves), it can be dismissively attributed to outside factors.
Ω
I was always happy to explain away my character in this fashion. “Oh, I behave this way because I was “born this way” or I at least had a predilection to be this way and eventually just ended up here.” It’s all well and good until you find yourself dealing with the likes of stress, anxiety and depression, and once these conditions dig in and take hold (as they unfortunately so often do) you reach the point where you begin to think “Oh well, I guess this is just who I am. A horribly stressed/anxious/depressed mess. Looks like I’m stuck like this forever.”
Ω
It’s a sad and frighteningly common feeling, that notion of “doing life” with an inescapable cell mate who is essentially you, and so it often takes a great deal of courage and strength to break out of that mentality and recognise that you, right here, right now, can be responsible for shaping who you are/will be – and unlike anything that happened to you as a child, or that you got lumped with from your biological parents, you finally have some say in it. And it all starts with choice.
Ω
Every day, in everything we do, we’re making choices. Big ones, small ones, ones that we’re making for the first time, and ones that we made for the first time a long time ago, and now we make without even thinking. These constant, and often subconscious choices we make according to reason and deliberation or feeling and instinct slowly but surely make their imprint upon us until “we form ourselves to respond predictably, build up a class of responses, an ever widening array of things and states we approach or avoid.”
Ω
Have you ever dropped something on the floor that’s kinda made a mess and found yourself entertaining two thoughts – “I dropped that. I should really clean that up” and “No one has seen me drop that, so it could’ve been anyone. I’ll leave it and someone else will clean it up.” I know, not exactly the moral conundrum that makes a riveting GoT episode, but something significant nonetheless. Because it is in these seemingly innocuous decision-making moments that we set precedents for our future choices and then in turn, our future character.
Ω
Many of histories great thinkers, including Aristotle and Sir Thomas Aquinas “place these depositions at the heart of morality, vice and virtue” and so essentially “at the heart of character”. Instead of deeming us trapped for a lifetime with an immovable identity, they instead assure us that “character is not just innate disposition but also an accretion of choices, a mixing of impulse and reason played out over time until it hardens into all how we are, and how we got there.” What they want to tell us is, “Be careful: as we begin, so we will become.”
Ω
It can be a somewhat difficult notion to face, as it lumps us with the very unromantic and effortful task of responsibility, but it also liberates us by offering us the ability to change. And, although change is often difficult, the idea that it is at least possible can help us manage and alter those less-than-pleasant parts of ourselves that we once may have considered to be set in stone. But from little things, big things grow, and so it is with making changes in ourselves. Large and life changing choices come around only every so often (unless you’re Buffy or Jack Bauer) but we make small choices every day. And entertaining the consideration of these choices, realising that they are indeed choices we can make, can start us down the road of who we want to be. But it takes time and repeated effort. Just like you’re not going to look like Miranda Kerr after eating a few quinoa salads and having one session of reformer pilates, you’re not going to change yourself by choosing to pick up that mess “that one time” – you’ve gotta commit, and pick up that mess every damn time.
Ω
“A deed, once done, creates tendency for its repetition and reactivation of the tendency gives it greater force. Eventually, these tendencies can harden into all we’ve got and become our character.”
Ω
(All quotes taken from Vincent Deary’s HOW WE ARE. If you’re into thinking about all this stuff, go read it. It’s awesome.)