Making Choices

If you stare at me and tell me, “This is what happened,” you may not actually be telling me what happened. You may be telling me what I’m supposed to agree happened. I’ll kick back against that every time. I have a choice whether to accept your story, and I want to be making choices that are the best I can make.

Patterns in Our Choices

I have a personality that wants to see the big picture. To make connections, see patterns. In order to do that, I need the umbrella view as well as the atomic view. Why do I want to see patterns? I want to understand the forces at work upon us as we live our lives. It’s why I majored in sociology, the science of the impact of group behavior. If I can better understand why we act and think like we do, I can be more effective in making choices.

This is my major thing: we always have choices. We have them now. We had them in the past, and we’ll have them in the future. That’s true in ourselves, our family, our group, our town, our state, our country. The problem is, once we come to an agreed-upon narrative, we often “forget” what choices were possible and still are.

Choices aren’t Fated

Mississippi is just fated to be a racist state, right? Wrong. In the 1900s, Governor Andrew Longino asked the legislature to outlaw lynching. This wasn’t a nobody crying in the wilderness. This was the governor. We had a choice, and we still have a choice. Not just on positions we want to take or people we want to admire. We can choose which exact values and traits we want to admire. If we require people to be “Admirable People,” we’re going to be disappointed (I do not admire many of Longino’s choices.) We can choose what actions, positions, traits we believe make the world a better place and support those.

To do that, we each have to know what we believe makes the world a better place—duh! But do I really know the answer to that question?

Once I figure out what I believe is deep down good for the world, I need to find folks who are implementing those values. The people making choices reflecting those values. Then I need to support those people. And those choices. And the future I want to see.

Piece of cake, right?