30/10/2019
We begin and end our day with making choices, right from simple things like waking up to more complex decisions like "should I quit my job?" In each of these scenarios, we are always making choices.
We always have a choice. It can't be put in a simpler way than this. The sentence "I don't have an option" doesn't exist. Even in a life and death situation, we have an option. When I say 'option', I don't mean choices in practically doing something. A choice can be about how one feels about a certain thing or how one chooses to react.
S**t keeps happening in life and it may seem like there's no choice with that, but how we deal with it and how we react to it is a choice that we have. We often catch ourselves using statements like"I have an option but they/he/she might feel bad that I didn't do what was expected of me." Of course, other people might be affected by your choice in a "good" or a "bad" way. But guess what, they have a choice too. The choice of what they want to do about your decisions. Let's leave that to them. They can take care of themselves and so can you.
No choice that you take is "right" or "wrong". There are only consequences and the fear/anxiety or hesitation to take responsibility for the consequences.
When we do what others decide for us and make a choice based on what others told us, we may be looking for someone to blame if the decision doesn't work well for us. But if we make a choice on our own, we can't really blame ourselves and even if we do, it's relatively difficult to be angry at ourselves and living with that can be even more difficult. Therefore, to avoid this we hope that someone else changes, we look for someone else to blame, and even if we blame ourselves, we play the victim and thereby end up feeling helpless.
Note: So we can feel helpless, we can feel hopeless but we can also choose to take responsibility and recognise the fact that we can change it.
