Every Moment Presents a Choice

The new year is upon us.

But today, rather than reflect on the prior year or plans for the future, I think we could use a reminder of a power we have always had.

That is the power to choose the direction of our lives, every moment of every day.

Sure, there is a life path we have found ourselves on through having created it, stumbled upon it, or found ourselves in it through necessity.

For better or worse, this is the reality of our lives.

Yet we always have choices.

A thought that has occurred to me is that many of us don’t truly understand the number of choices available to us in a given day.

Consider this: A dear friend once criticized me upon realizing that in a day we spent together, he had made every decision about what we did. He got tired of it, and he asked me:

Have you even made a single choice today?

His question made me realize that every moment of that day had presented me with a choice. I could go along the easy route with the path unfolding before me, or I could fight against it.

Neither way is necessarily better than the other, but that is the key, predominant choice of our lives. Flow along with the stream of destiny, or work to create your own path.

I explained to my friend that I had made countless choices that day, all of which involved doing what he wanted to do and spending time with him. Even in that moment of discussion, I had chosen to continue our conversation rather than part ways.

Every moment is a choice.

It so happens that with me, when everything is going well, I don’t fight the path in front of me. I allow it to unfold as it does, to take me where it flows, but I am still choosing that.

But what about when your life’s path presents more and more obstacles, and you dread what lies ahead?

In such cases, we must use the power we have to make a choice.

Even if you made a mistake, and for 100 moments in a day, you chose to continue along a futile, unrewarding, miserable path, you still have the power at any moment to change that.

Every moment of every day gives you the opportunity to change it all around.

Even when it comes to mental states – if, in the course of a day, you find yourself unhappy and bored, you can ask what choices led you to that. And if you make new choices in a different direction, can you begin to find the happiness and stimulation that you need?

Taking things further, even our beliefs about ourselves or the world, and thus the emotional states that may follow can be a choice.

Here is a belief some people may hold:

I believe I have little power, and my life’s path has been decided by my parents, the government, or society.

The issue with that belief would be that it completely nullifies your ability to choose your life’s path. If you are willing to accept your power of choice in every moment of every day and do something with it, then you have that power in you.

However, if you are not willing to accept that you have that power, then you do not have it. You have taken your own power away, then.

Consider this: How many choices or opportunities for change do we get in the course of a day?

Let’s say a moment is equal to a second. Then that would mean that in your waking hours, or 16 hours, there are 57,600 moments where you can make a choice. That is quite a few….

Those are 57,600 opportunities where you can choose to continue along a path or to seek a new one. To use your own judgment or pursue a mentor to guide you. To rely on the same habitual ways of believing and behaving or to pave a new path of being. To value time and use it wisely, or waste it on nonsense. To help yourself or another, or help no one.

Even to reflect on your choices or not, or to write down what you have learned or not are choices you get to make.

The choices are seemingly infinite. Yet there is always a choice.

Of course, it’s easier to blame others and say they are at fault for the setbacks in our lives. And perhaps other people are at fault, to some extent. But complaining, obsessing, or stressing about that does nothing for your progress.

In fact, if you get hung up on how others are at fault, you are the one who has chosen to delay your own life’s progress.

So, of course, we must avoid that and accept our power to choose every moment of every day.

How can you use your power of choice?:

When your time is being wasted, with nothing to gain from it, choose to use it on something more beneficial. Or at least decide to avoid such wasted time in the future.

When you are disrespected and unappreciated, choose to pursue better people to spend your time with.

When you have been treated unjustly, choose to speak up rather than ignore the issue.

When you have made horrible mistakes, choose to learn and improve.

When someone needs help, choose to help if you can.

Choose to see the good in people and situations and not just the bad that is there.

Some of us who do not use our power of choice may not know what we want. In that case, we should reflect on what we believe to be truly important.

For example: Family, Peace, Success, Love, Happiness, Mastery, Knowledge, Awareness, Service, Giving, Truth, and so on. What is most important to you?

Then ask, are your choices helping you to create the life you ultimately want to live? And are you taking advantage of all the choices available to you at every moment in time?

Of course, the point here is not to get overwhelmed with so many choices, as who really needs 57,600 choices? The point is this:

Realize that every moment of your life is a moment of true possibility, where your life can begin to unfold in a new direction of your choosing.

What better time to reflect on that, and to truly understand it and make it a way of life, than the new year, here and now….

---

Big Audiobook Promotion

I would like to announce that most of my audiobooks are now discounted to 70% off on Spotify, Google Play, Chirp, Barnes & Noble, and Apple. If you listen to audiobooks, this is an excellent deal to take advantage of to start the new year! (This promotion lasts until 3/31/23)

Real Learning Comes Through Transformation

“Learning—real learning, wisdom—comes only when you are transformed. It is not an additive process—you cannot just go on adding knowledge to yourself. You will have to go through a transmutation that is hard.” – The Buddha Said… by Osho

I am only on the fifth chapter (out of 22) of The Buddha Said… and already I can see that this book carries great wisdom. It will be worth reading carefully, applying, and rereading, and reapplying. That is what I plan to do. The knowledge in this book could take time and effort to master, as it seems to guide us toward enlightenment.

The passage quoted above was insightful to me, yet it may appear quite obvious on its surface. I have found that most worthy wisdom is just that. It seems obvious and straightforward and often even easy to apply, yet very few of us do.

For example, I can tell you that getting impatient is bad. The next time someone is irritating you or provoking you, ignore it. Let it be. Take a breath and pay attention to something worthwhile in life.

Yet, for someone with the habit of impatience, will they listen and change?

Or I can tell you that to be lazy is bad. Do not waste this life. Go out and have the courage to find something that truly matters to you and that will make a difference in this world. Stop doing the bare minimum to get by and increase the standard you expect from yourself.

Yet, for someone with the habit of laziness, will they listen and change?

Or I can tell you that to be vengeful is bad. Stop wishing to get payback on all those that commit wrongs against you. In some cases, they are poisoned from having been wronged, making them want to wrong others. And in other cases, they don’t know the wrongs they commit and do so through a lack of awareness. Lastly, as we have all heard, “An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind,” so is this something we want to give energy to?

Yet, for someone with the habit of vengeance, will they listen and change?

As you may guess, I find it unlikely that the person with a habit of something will suddenly change their life from being exposed to mere words.

Despite that I work as a writer and earn my living this way, it is painful to admit that the words themselves are empty if they don’t cause personal transformation. The learning, the knowledge, the wisdom, the teachings—all of it is empty, useless, and fruitless if we do not change from within.

Yet I have seen, as you have seen, that most of us know the right things to do, to be, to say, and yet fail to do them. Perhaps we need to come to the awareness more deeply that the only worthwhile learning was not in the accumulation of knowledge, facts, or even the pursuit of higher understanding.

Rather, the only worthwhile learning was in whether we could become aware, change who we are, and perform new and better actions. Awareness is not enough—to be aware is to see that something is happening. But to see it and do nothing seems to be a massive failure, worse than not having seen it at all.

If you see a wall and walk into it, isn’t that somehow worse than someone who never saw the wall and walked into it accidentally?

We must become aware, change who we are, and perform new and better actions.

The point is to do something with all the accumulation of knowledge and facts. Otherwise, the learning was useless. This is not something we hear often.

I am a big believer in education and learning. But what we often forget is that as humans, what we learn should be causing some change within us. And that change within us should cause some change in the real world.

In a similar vein, Mahatma Gandhi said:

“If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him.”

If I read the tragic history of a people, and then I live my life normally, without my heart having grown, giving to charity, or learning more about their present-day struggles, then what have I truly learned?

If I “learn” by acquiring facts, and change nothing, then isn’t that a personal failing?

Yet, the point of this post is not to make us all feel guilty for anything we ever learned, where we failed to convert it into some positive action. The point is to see that we need to be brave and encourage these personal changes to happen.

I have seen many highly educated people increase their learning and awareness while failing to grow at all. I’ve been guilty of this too.

How much time do we spend reading the news versus actually doing something about the world's tragedies?

How much time do we spend educating our children about “the real world” while denying them the ability actually to participate in it?

And how much do we consume books or media while not producing something worthy in return?

Having written this post up to here, I believe you probably already knew everything I just stated. So if we already knew, why haven’t we committed to acquiring more helpful ideas and performing more actions that could help us change more profoundly?

The reason is that we fear change. Even for those who want progress, it still can feel scary or overwhelming to make a significant change.

But we don’t need to make massive changes in every area of our lives, suddenly.

We can decide on certain things that we find to be important and then invest ourselves into them.

I use the word invest because when you invest, you risk losing something. Your risk may be that you hope to help improve something, and in the end, you don’t make much of an impact. Then you may be let down or upset. But of course, we have to be willing to risk losing something to make our impact.

The outcomes we desire are never guaranteed. There is always a risk. We need to choose which risks are worth taking, where we can hope to gain a worthy experience that transforms us.

I think we fear changes because we tend to fear death. Change is the death of something old and the birth of something new. However, why should we fear it? We can guide the change in our lives by moving away from those things that do not work, which are not fruitful, and moving toward the ones that are.

We may find that the greatest life lessons come from the most significant changes within us or around us. Yet great changes imply some form of loss, which again is what we fear. We must become comfortable with the idea of losing something (or someone) if we ever wish to gain anything that truly matters.

We cling even to the things that don’t do us much good because they are familiar. They make us feel at home. But sometimes, that home is worth letting go of, to introduce something that compels us to grow.

In the end, we will lose our lives and everything we ever gained. All of that was temporary. But if we work on transforming ourselves, we will leave a permanent impact on the people around us and on the universe itself.

The universe is not static—it is ever-evolving and changing. Perhaps we could learn something from that.

The key lesson of the day is that we should continue to learn. But for that learning to be worth something, we should be ready and willing to change from within. This can mean seeing the world in a new way, feeling in a new way, and then deciding to stop doing something we used to do—and doing something in a way that we never did before.

We have not truly learned unless we have been transformed from the inside.

As a practical tip, after you read something or learn something, ask yourself:

What has truly changed?

If nothing, then ask:

What can I change, and should I change, given what I just learned?