Choice

Tags

acceptance, choice, interpretation, judgment, Meg Wheatley, perseverance, react, respond, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

Life sometimes seems to be offering us little choice. When we’re young we have to go to school, we eat what our parents put before us, we do what we’re told, etc. When older, sometimes it feels the same when our patterns are established and we go to work, we spend our money on necessities (or not) and sometimes life seems to winnow the list of choices we have to fit into how much time we have in our busy schedules (but who makes the schedule?).

I am considering the topic of choice today not because I feel constrained by the number of hours in the day (although as I get older that sometimes rankles) but because of Margaret Wheatley’s book, Perseverance, that I chose for my morning reflection. Here’s a little of what she said – which you might choose to consider as I did, whether you are making judgments about time constraints, other people or anything in your life.

We need first to notice that we’ve made choices about everything in our lives. How we react and respond, every single feeling, is a choice. Every situation has infinite possibilities for interpretation and reaction. But we collapse all those possibilities the second we assign a feeling or judgment to the situation. (Page 103)

So, really, it’s more about how we feel about our choices and/or how we judge them that makes the difference in our acceptance of them. I will be spending some time with this thought today. Will you?

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