“Managing the power of choice, with all its creative and spiritual implications, is the essence of human experience. All spiritual teachings are directed toward inspiring us to recognize that the power to make choices is the dynamic that converts our spirits into matter, our words into flesh. Choice is the process of creation itself.”  —Caroline Myss

From that quote on the power of choice, let me first segue a bit to my favorite dictum from St. Augustine: “Deus qui creavit te sine te, non salvabit te sine te” (God who created you without you, cannot save you without you).

What St. Augustine meant may be deduced into two parts: first, when God created us, he did not consult us, hence it was not our choice but God’s; second, when it comes to our salvation, God cannot save us without our free consent and cooperation.

Ostensibly, the exercise of choice belongs to the faculty of the will (which God has deemed as free). But not exclusively with the will, because the intellect serves as operative requisite in the act of choosing or decision-making. Rightly so, we can’t simply make a choice unless we are aware (or conscious) of what to choose about. Thus, when God created us, it wasn’t within the scope of our choice as precisely we were not aware of it. 

And, in the domain of intellect, here’s a classic Latin dictum that I learned back in the seminary: “Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu” (There is nothing in the mind that does not come from the senses).

But this empiricist stance of epistemology (John Locke’s “tabula rasa” and Aristotle’s “empeiria”) is opposed by the rationalist or deductive school of thought. Thus, the antithetical positions between Plato and Aristotle, between Thomas Aquinas and Augustine.

In the realm of free will, there are two contending sides. One is the libertarian view, which argues that actions are freely chosen by an autonomous agent. The other one is the determinist view, which argues that our behavior is caused by a combination of genetics, past experiences, and current circumstance.

A host of factors

Enough with the philosophical sauntering. I just want to underscore the point that apart from sense experience and knowledge, there are a host of factors that come into play in our due exercise of free choice or decision-making: previous experience, cognitive biases, individual differences, belief in personal relevance, and level of commitment. Behavioral experts would even proffer the “science” of heuristics, or “rules-of-thumb to guide decision-making based on a more limited subset of available information.” A classic example of this is, when choosing between different brands of food items at the grocery store, you simplify the decision by going with the brand with which you had the best previous experience. 

In layman’s understanding, choice is the activity we initiate in our brains to reach an outcome. This outcome can take various forms such as decision, judgment, assessment, or behavior. In this context, hence, choice is theoretically broader than decision-making or the “process” by which one reaches a decision.

Now, there’s no denying that as long as we’re alive we’re always beset with choices (even including, right now, your choice of reading this article or your choice to agree or disagree with my opinion and insights).

But what about if we’re inevitably faced with life’s immensely hard choices—between right and wrong, between life and death? Or if we’re pushed to the corner of having “no choice” at all?

Insights

Here are some profound insights.

1. Often, when faced with equally painful options, we easily resort to “I had no choice,” but only to escape responsibility or be held accountable for our choice.

Paraphrasing Audrey Thompson’s blog in medium.com, instead of claiming our own power by saying “I decided to” or “I chose to,” we resort to saying “my only choice was to” or “I had no choice,” implying that we are not responsible for our decision, its outcome, or its consequences. 

Rather than see ourselves as active participants and authors of our own lives, we blame external forces (a person, a company, government, social mores, economy, religious dogma, cultural history, or even our childhood) for the “choice-less” situation we are in.

The fact is that, according to Thompson, when we look closely at how decisions work, we can see up to eight choices at any given time: this one, that one, both of them, neither of them, some of this one, some of that one, some of both of them, and something else.

2. Even in such a point of no-choice, there’s still freedom. 

My favorite author (philosopher, psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor) Viktor Frankl said it wisely: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

We may get stuck in the worst of situations, but we can always remain free. Because our mind belongs to us. Our thoughts are ours only, and the attitude we choose determines the outcome of our situation.

Frankl said that in the concentration camp, “The prisoner who had lost faith in the future—his future—was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay.”

But rising above the suffering, choosing to turn a tragedy into a triumph—that’s what Frankl calls finding your meaning in life. 

3. Love is the fundamental choice and highest form of meaning.

Again, Frankl said, “The truth is that—love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.”

The meaning of life is found in the connections we form with others. Love gives us something to live for, something that provides hope and comfort even in the most insufferable of conditions. In sum, indeed, life is a choice. Let’s choose to live, learn, love and laugh.