Choosing can lead to certainty. In Karate Kid, Miyagi Sensei drew the comparison between Daniel’s choice to practice martial arts and walking down the road: “Walk left side, safe. Walk right side, safe. Walk middle, sooner or later, get squish just like grape.”

Choosing or waffling

We live in balance between extremes. Sometimes, we may experience much of life as a grey area rather than everything being in black and white, yet when it comes to making decisions, things truly become binary. We say yes or no. Choose chocolate or vanilla.* Whether you believe in free will or not, the experience of choice can either be empowering or disabling. We choose something and move on with our lives with confidence, or we waffle back and forth, often second-guessing ourselves. We can walk out of the ice cream shop enjoying a frosty treat, or we can spend the next hour wondering if we should have ordered a different flavor.

Control over circumstances

Most of us go through life feeling like we have little or no control over our circumstances and what happens to us. We say, “This is my job and there’s nothing I can do about it,” or “My kids are messy so obviously my house will always be messy.” The truth is, we have much more power than we think and we must exercise that power to create the life and world that we want for ourselves and the future. Though it may not be easy, we can get new jobs or teach our kids to clean.

Yet there are certainly things that we cannot change. Everyone we know will get old and die, the sun will rise and set, and there will always be traffic in LA. We may choose to get plastic surgery to postpone the inevitable or start working the night shift to avoid traffic (or the sun), this doesn’t really change the things that do not change.

Going back to our experience of life, if we keep hoping things change instead of doing something about it, we experience helplessness. If we keep hoping things will change that cannot change, we waste time and energy and live in despair. There is another way.

Choosing our life

We can simply choose our life. Specifically, we choose to be with the things in our lives that don’t change or that we won’t change. This is a binary decision. We choose our job or we choose to get a new one. We choose our marriage or we choose divorce. If we choose our current partner, we can still work to make our relationship better. Yet that is a totally different feeling from constantly second-guessing, wondering if we should end our relationship and look for a new partner. 

Years ago, I was sitting at dinner with someone I didn’t really feel like spending time with at the moment. I had the feeling of being stuck, which wasn’t enjoyable. Then I had the realization that I could at any moment stand up and leave, even though it might be rude. I realized that in fact, I was choosing to be there. That freedom instantly allowed me to enjoy myself, and I’m sure I was more pleasant to be around.

Binary decision

Once we make a binary decision, we get to move on and direct our time and energy towards other things that need our attention. Meditation helps us to be aware of our straying thoughts so when our mind starts questioning the choices we’ve made, we can bring it back to the present. 

Once we have chosen, a world of calm certainty opens up before us. We lose the desperate concern over how life will go, even though we don’t know all the details. When we go to our job, we get to pour ourselves productively into the work to be done. If something annoys us and pulls us out of that way of being, we may need to choose our job again. When our partner leaves the dishes in the sink instead of putting them in the dishwasher, we may need to choose them again. We may need to choose our life every day. There is nothing wrong with this.

Choosing now

Try this right now. Choose something in your life as if you had all the power in the universe and could make anything happen. Choose that aspect of life, exactly as it is, as if you were creating it from pure matter and energy. There it is. Enjoy that thing, because there is no other way it should be. Now choose the rest of life.

*Some of you are thinking, “What about chocolate-vanilla swirl? Or strawberry?” We are really choosing ice cream or no ice cream, chocolate or no chocolate, vanilla or no vanilla, chocolate-vanilla swirl or no chocolate vanilla swirl, strawberry or no strawberry. Every choice can be broken down to a binary decision, so let’s not pretend everything has to be so complicated.