Choose to Choose

I remember a time when there were serious and continuous debates over whether people were the product of their heredity or of their environment. Each side seemed determined to prove conclusively that it was the only possible conclusion and each went to great lengths in the media to advance their opinions and make them widely known and believed. However, after living my life and witnessing first-hand the effects of both heredity and environment on myself and those around me I have come to the conclusion that humans are the product of neither heredity nor environment but of choice.

I was still a young mother when my sister came to me with a dilemma involving the disciplining of her children. I suggested a course of action which I myself had practiced and found both effective and helpful. It involved some thought and planning but in the end it was obviously beneficial to both myself and the children. My sister said that she could see that it would be effective. She agreed that it was a better solution than the one she had been trying and yet, she felt that she was not capable of such action. When I asked her why not, she simply responded that she had been 'raised that way'. She then went into a soliloquy about some of the parenting practices she had been subject to as a child which had affected her and which, she believed, somehow held her bound to continue.

I looked at her in disbelief as she enumerated and listed her various grievances until she had finished with a hopeless sigh. In my innocence I quietly replied that I had had the same parents and had simply learned that there were some things they practiced which I felt were not as effective as they ought to be, so I decided to find another and better way if possible. I said that I did not feel bound by my upbringing to practice certain faulty behaviors and then shift responsibility for my own actions onto my parents. I said I didn't think I ought to blame my parents for my own poor choices; that I was capable of choosing well, in spite of what they may have done to me.

It is easy to become a victim of life in a world where there are people who are dishing out unkind words and actions. Without even thinking about it people generally want to return unkindness with more unkindness. Children, especially, will exhibit this behavior automatically at a very early age. In my home I have always told my children that when someone was unkind to them, they ought to say to themselves “This is wrong and I don't like it, so I will never do this to someone else.” In this way, they take positive action toward the future by committing to be better. It also empowers the injured person with the strength to leave behind the poor choices of others and choose for himself actions he can approve of.

Still, there are some who would argue that choice is not entirely free; that it can be forced, stopped or coerced. But, when faced with this dilemma, I always go back to the mind and heart where choices occur. Humans use only a small percentage of their mental capacity. If we feel that our choices are limited, perhaps we should be looking harder for more choices. Knowledge is power, the power to choose. So if, instead of trying to make someone else choose something we like, or lamenting past choices of others that may have hurt us, we might try opening our consciousness to the vast array of choices available to us in the unexplored regions of knowledge, truth and wisdom.

The difference between me and my sister was only that I had chosen to expand my vision of choices that might be made while she was still choosing to be bound by the choices of others. She didn't even realize that she had made that choice but it confined her just the same.

Heredity and environment can influence and push us in certain directions and can even control our lives, if we let them. But ultimately, the choice to BE influenced or pushed is ours. When we realize this, then the freedom to choose begins and the tyranny of the past ends.

Here's to Freedom!