Life's a box of chocolates - but do you get to pick?

In the sea of myriad options, there lies a row of lifeboats called choices – each carrying you to a different shore.

I’ve spent hours wondering what is harder – the lack of possibilities to a desolate person or the luxury of one too many choices to the privileged and picking the wrong ones?

Every choice leads to a subsequent outcome which presents further choices. While the sequence of events is often defined by randomness (or by chance or luck – whatever you’d like to call it), a lot is still left to the choices we make in the moment when the forking road arrives.

Our choices of beliefs on which we build our foundation, the people we choose to surround ourselves with, the conscious thinking and the lack of thought to all else as well as the choice of action/ inaction determines who we are.

While the belief system may be ingrained in us as part of our conditioning, the undoing of ideologies that we disagree with, is a choice.

The people we’re surrounded with may often be a function of externalities beyond our control but giving them time, attention and mind space remains our choice.

In the 24 hours of conscious and subconscious thinking, the feeder of thoughts and it’s filtering is largely in our control. While millions of thoughts may pass, how many of those thoughts stay in our minds are part of our conscious willingness to keep them – for reasons best known to us, but reasons which may not be the best for us.

Every decision point and circumstance calls for action or inaction. Inaction, in itself is often an action, and hence, a very conscious choice.

In a simpler world of lesser access, we had more time to think, to analyze, to reflect. I wonder if the luxury to focus on the present and to get absorbed by it wholly with no urgency to move to the next affected the quality of choices.

Every piece of modern writing suggests seeking and learning and growing by experiencing more, but it doesn’t tell us how to choose. Lost in the ocean of choices, we often drown, not always by a wrong choice but sometimes by decision fatigue.

Are we then a sum of our choices or just a string of random events woven together which we justify via the paths we think we decided to take?