At every step, we are faced with the problem of choice: choosing dishes on the menu and products in the store, place of work and study, companions for the evening or for life, personal philosophy or religion, vacation itineraries and election candidates.
We are surprised to find out that you can choose something that you did not suspect before — the country of residence and even gender. Our time is the time of continuous elections. Not everyone is happy about it. It seems to many that freedom of choice brings one headache and happy is the one for whom everything is decided by someone else. This is an infantile position: children differ from adults in that everything is decided for them by others, and if they have to make important decisions themselves early, we say that they have been deprived of their childhood. Choice is the burden and privilege of an adult.
Faced with the need to make this or that decision, many of us try to “calculate” or “guess” how it will be better: you always want to believe that it’s enough time to turn onto a happy path and it will lead you exactly where you need to. More often than not, however, such hopes turn out to be illusory.
Every time I meet a beggar, I choose whether to give him or pass by. I know that many of today’s urban beggars are wealthy people who have turned begging into a profitable business. But what if this particular person really needs it? I’m trying to guess whether the «pro» in front of me or a victim of circumstances, but I can not verify the correctness of my guess.
Therefore, the responsibility for the decision still remains with me — I find the answer in the internal impulse to file or not to file here and now, and after that I will no longer be able to refer to some external “because” or complain that I have become a victim of deception.
The famous Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote that in any serious choice we choose different versions of ourselves*. Genuine choices always change a person, and different decisions change us in different ways. Choosing one or the other, an adult, not according to documents, but in fact a person, invests his own energy, time, other resources in this decision and stakes on one of the possibilities for his development — or on maintaining the status quo.
The main thing is to be aware that everything that happens to us was once chosen by us, even if in a hurry we slipped through this or that life “fork” without noticing it. As the psychotherapist Elena Kaliteevskaya says, the choice is not what we have yet to do, but what we are already doing.
* S. Kierkegaard. «Pleasure and Duty». Phoenix, 1998.