Do You Have The Freedom To Choose?

The Space of Choice

Houses get dusty, people grow old, machines break, men destroy, and everything that lives dies.

Yet, people build, and plant, and create. Children are born, and the world changes and grows in beautiful, new, and exciting ways.

Both are true.

The world is dying, and the world is growing and unfolding.

Life is full of contradictions.

Which side of life do you choose to focus on?

Do you focus your energy, through speech or action, on decay, destruction, and what’s wrong with the world? (This is a focus on fear, and how the world will harm you.)

Or, do you focus your heart, your energy, your speech, and your actions on what is possible? Do you seek to repair what is broken, and to look for ways to create wonder?

Do you believe in choice?

Or do you think that who you are, and what you do, is determined, either by genetics, or the way that you were brought up.

I love the way that Steven Covey, in The Eighth Habit, speaks about choice. This book like his others are essential reading in the field of personal development.

Covey says that there is a space between stimulus (an influence, something desirable, something undesirable) and your response (a feeling, what you see, what you do).

Do your thoughts, your feelings, and your experience deny this?

Does it seem that you have no choice in how you react?

“He made me angry.”

“I can’t stand when she does that!”

How do you find that space between stimulus and response?

Sometimes that space seems very small, and we move too fast between stimulus and response.

But a seed is also small.

Take care of it, and it grows.

At first, your power to choose your response is small.

But when you exercise that power of choice, it grows, and the space of choice grows larger and larger.

Ignore or deny your power of choice for long enough, and it shrinks.

But always, the seed remains.