The dictionary says that a decision is a determination made after examining a problem, a situation. But the decision can also mean a solution to the problem under consideration. And this solution is often one of several possible solutions. So it also includes the meaning of choosing an option.
Decisions, decisions, decisions… Many of the aspects that our bodily awareness observes as present in us do not involve decisions, because they are automatisms that our physiology deals with. To breathe or not to breathe? To be hungry or not to be hungry? These are all needs, necessities, and they are only conclusions, not determinations. And then, once we have become aware of them, we can choose what to do with them. To choose our attitude towards them. We humans are limited, determined beings, but with enormous potential, when we realize that we have this power to choose how to relate to what happens to us. The cosmos cannot be controlled by us, but what the cosmos brings forward can be accepted or rejected by us. Obviously, if we are deeply unfulfilled people, for example if we haven’t eaten anything for two days, it will be much harder for us to refuse a hot meal. By rejecting and repressing some normal and healthy needs, or by not fulfilling them in a well-timed way, we can create a state of very intense tension about satisfying them. But man, in the beauty of his spiritual power, with which he has been invested by the Creator, can learn step by step, little by little, to choose his attitude to what happens to him from outside.
Do we choose our future, determine it and therefore control it by what we strictly choose? No! We are unable to understand the multitude of variables that shape reality and so make decisions that lead to certain outcomes. To think so would be childish. So what is there to do? To abandon all forms of decision making, to worship meaninglessness and to mourn at every opportunity our state as victims of the system, the cosmos and the fatality of our destiny as creatures? Absolutely not! For if before we spoke of the desire to control the world and the unwillingness to cooperate with it, now we come to believe ourselves controlled by the world and thus become incapable of cooperating with ourselves. Through this extremist approach the tiny but real capital of freedom that we have as humans becomes inaccessible to us.
Life is a relationship, an interconnection between our inner self and the outside world. The self looks out into the world so that it can receive the experience of the world in the intimacy of its subjectivity, and then choose its attitude to what is offered to it from outside. This is where the most important component of the decision comes in. Aware of this freedom you can choose if your experiences are obstacles or opportunities. You can decide to take what is offered to you and turn the available possibilities into something better. Or you can choose to resist experiences whereby the world constrains you from outside beyond your power to decide. But then you will have to repeatedly lie to yourself that things are happening strictly on your terms and try through repeated displays of force to give the world the shape of your individual desires. Which I think is also very exhausting. It feels like trying to catch the wind in your hands. Always refusing what is given to you and trying to reconstruct everything in a synthetic way. Here’s a first way you can influence your future through your choices. You can choose to receive or reject what you receive. This can cause you to find peace with what is coming to you, even if you cannot predict the whole path ahead, or you can live in a state of violence and resistance to the world. Always be tense about the possibility that your wishes may not come true. You will find yourself in a battle with an imaginary ghost, because your wasted effort will be in constantly defining what should and should not happen to you. It’s something fundamental in relation to your future, you can either accept its uncertainty and have peace, or you can burn out and burn fast, feeding the illusion that you can control it. Choose!
And because life is a relationship, an interconnection between our inner self and the outside world, our self has the chance, in turn, to shape the outside space. Not just to be shaped internally by what the outside world brings in to experience. But even in this space of creation, there are constraint-based and freedom-based approaches. Earlier we noted that the world brings you many limitations, that is, constraints that are beyond your power of determination. In relation to these, two different approaches emerge. They can be seen as opportunities and thus be transformed into positive gain, or they can be reduced to the status of obstacles in the way of your desires, obstacles that prevent you from achieving your intended reward. In turn, as a creator, you can also have two approaches to the world. The transfer of your art from the subjective inner space to the objective outer space can also have two different modes of manifestation. You can choose a tyrannical approach, one in which your creative force crushes others to make them uniform to your perspective. This shows an immense fragility of self and has to do with those creators who cannot bear to be opposed or cancelled out by the disapproval of the world, because to invalidate their art means for them to invalidate their selves. So they seek to annihilate all opposition and often do this through megalomania and histrionic behavior. A good example would be Salvador Dali. Or you can choose the aristocratic path of power, where, from the inner security of who you are, you generously offer others the joy you already have within yourself, the joy of being who you are deeply and authentically. So you are not seeking to validate your self through the greatness of your work, but you are seeking to shrink the spaciousness of your self, which you already know, through an act of reducing yourself, as with any authentic art form. This is why a mother, such as the virgin Mary, who raised Jesus despite the social stigma people placed on her because of the way she became pregnant, demonstrates a much stronger self than many of the great creators. Jesus of Nazareth was the creative work of Mary’s power to love. No one elevates Mary to the status of a goddess, she was a human being like the rest of us, with fears and weaknesses. But she knew who she was and out of the steadfastness of her own self offered love and protection to the infant Jesus. This was for her a gift that God placed in her womb, and she said a grateful yes to what the Creator had offered. In this way Mary became a participant in an act of creation based on the power to love and not on a constraining force. She chose to receive the gift through the archangel Gabriel and then offered it to the world. For the One who then saved the world was flesh of her flesh. Only in this way, when you know who you are and not what you do validates or invalidates who you are, you can give to the world out of love, give to it because you are generous, not because you want to win its applause. A true creator shrinks himself in order to give to others, he does not try to enlarge himself by making a pedestal out of the objects he makes. Dali instead, in his assumed megalomania, used his talent to show off his superior creative self. The life of one who chooses Dali’s path becomes an effort to impose one’s inner vision by force. Such a vision validates its value only when it succeeds in crushing and removing that which opposes it. As long as the truth of self-worth is based on a logic of inferiority and superiority, a logic of self-affirmation through the defeat of others, such an approach based on constraint and force is inevitable. This is the way of those who do not know who they are, when they remain silent. They need to speak up and speak loudly in order to believe they matter. They need to be heard and even silence others in order to see themselves as valuable. How sad, how painful, to be driven from behind with such a merciless whip. It is up to you how you choose to order the space you have been given to live in. You can decide to be a generous creator by the decisions you make and contribute to personal or general well-being, or you can become a dictator, one who controls everything according to his individual interest. And this interest does not come from the freedom and joy of being at rest within yourself, but is a rigid interest that comes from the insecurity of one who has a very weak self. He compulsively wants to perpetuate his self, afraid of its annihilation if he does not make the effort necessary to express it through external objects. It’s a hard choice, it’s a life and death choice, but it’s a choice. Choose!
Here at Much To Be Told we care about choices. We want to learn to make choices based on what life offers us, even if we don’t always like the way it constrains us. Because when we learn to enjoy what is, our future will truly become what it can be. Meaning a little corner of heaven and not a crack in hell. We want to learn who we really are beyond the roles our outward actions assign to us. Let’s start by accepting what our limits are and what are the conditions under which we move, so that we can rest in the space of our heart, even if our exteriority validates or invalidates us. Then we can decide to create generously to give to the world out of love and not out of a desire to constrain it to love us. So if you invest time, to know who you are and find rest in who you are, and not just validate who you need to be to get applauded, your future will come to you through peace and not through soul-destroying effort and violence. Choose today not to impose your fragile self on the future, choose to stop telling yourself that the future will welcome it in if you continue to promote that same lie. And this lie is nothing more than the wasted effort of compulsive acts of self procreation. No, dare today to let the future come to know who you were today, free from the burden of your name meaning something in the future. This is the way because the present is the only measure of your freedom. You will succeed in making your name known only when you already know it, only when it is accessible to you before the world speaks it into your ears. Choose!
