Choice. A gray area, a moral conundrum. Do we allow free choice and risk the chance that people will choose wrong? Or do we dictate choice so that the right decisions are made every time? What are some things you wish were chosen for you, or things you are grateful to have chosen yourself? And what if someone wasn’t allowed free choice, or was allowed so much freedom that nothing stopped them? What would happen?
Write a sentence, write a story, write a song, write a scene. Let me know what you think about this quote and read a few examples below to get you going.
Example #1:
Faith.
Sometimes I love that God gave us the ability to choose–the ability to love Him of our own volition, the ability to follow Him of our own will, the ability to decide whether we are in this or not.
Other times I wish He would have just picked for us.
Have you ever woken up and thought, Now what am I going to wear today? The green dress? Or the plaid jacket? I just don’t know–I wish someone else would decide for me.
That’s me on a daily basis. I hate making decisions.
“How many cookies do you want to take back with you?” “All of them. I can’t eat all of them–10. 10 cookies. Nah, I probably only need 8. Well, or make it 11 just to be safe.”
“What time should I pick you up?” “Um…8:30? Or what about 9? We could just do 10 and call it good. Or we could cancel and try later sometime when I can make up my mind. You know what, let’s just go for 8:45ish to be safe.”
This one’s my favorite:
“What are you going to do after you graduate?” “Well, probably I’ll write for some companies, maybe, like doing their social media and stuff. Also I may go into publishing–see if I can’t work at a publishing house reading manuscripts or something. Though, I really would like to work for a magazine or newspaper…and of course there’s grad school and professorial work and all that too, so…you know, I think I’ll probably just live at home and work at a coffee shop. That’s probably easiest.”
This is the life we face on a daily basis.
To be or not to be? That is a very, very good question.
But what happens when we take away that question–when we don’t get to decide for ourselves?
When we wear a uniform day in and day out because deciding is too hard.
Or we get handed the allotted amount of cookies every day, or handed a strict schedule to which we must adhere, whether we want to or not.
Or if we were selected to hold a certain position in society and didn’t get a word in edgewise about our own opinions.
Or, even worse, if we were told that we all had to be Christian, or Muslim, or Hindu, or Atheist, because that’s the way that life was and we had to follow the decree.
Maybe, just maybe, choosing is really what we wanted after all.
I’m currently perusing the Wife of Bath (from the Canterbury Tales) for my Chaucer class this fall, and I’m learning a lot about the concept of choice. If you aren’t familiar with the story, a Knight is given the task of finding out what women desire, and eventually finds the answer in an old hag who makes him marry her in return for her answer. He is not too excited about that plan, but has no choice, and marries her in secret. Then, she asks if he would rather she be beautiful and faithless or ugly and faithful. In reply, the Knight says (and this is the important part)
“It’s up to you. You decide.”
Miraculously, this was exactly what the woman wanted–the ability to choose. So, to reward the good Knight for his permission to choose, the woman becomes beautiful and faithful.
What a testament to humanity.
We can pretend that we hate making decisions, or we aren’t good at it, or that we would rather just have life handed to us. But really, when push comes to shove, that’s not what we want at all.
We want to say. We want to voice our opinions and our ideas. And we certainly do not want to be forced into doing something we don’t want to do.
We want to choose: for good or for evil.
That’s the power of choice.
Example #2:
Helena groaned and shook her head, trying to hold in her frustration like the therapist had taught her, while simultaneously fighting the urge to scream.
After all of this time spent following her dad’s wishes and fulfilling his desires, and now he wasn’t going to let her choose where to go to college?
He had to be kidding. He had to be.
There was no way she’d endured four long years of homeschooling for him to decide that she needed to stay right where she was, confining her to the whole 2 mile radius of this miserable little town called Stanton, Indiana.
There was no way.
She argued and pleaded, alternately shouting obscenities and calmly discussing the complete unfairness of his decision.
But no matter the decibel she reached, or the steadiness of her claims, he would have none of it.
“You are going to go to community college here, and that is final. I’m sorry, but I need your help around the house. Not to mention the fact that you owe me.”
There it was again–that casual reminder of what she’d done, what she’d tried so desperately to forget.
Usually this argument, this little piece of blackmail that so ominously hung around, was enough to convince her to bite her tongue.
Not this time.
She applied to the school in California without really having a plan. She only had enough money to pay for the first semester and the entry fees, but she figured that was enough time for her to figure something else out.
She could get loans. She could get a job. She could make it work without his money.
It was her life, not his.
When she received her acceptance letter in the mail, she was overjoyed–free at last, free at last, was the mantra in her mind for the rest of the month. But she waited to tell her father, postponing that conversation for as long as she could stand it.
When the admissions office asked for her to fly out to California for a visitation weekend, she politely declined, giving them hoards of excuses and forging her dad’s signature to prove it. She nearly missed the deadline for signing up for classes as a result, but she somehow managed to make it just in time, even though she was scheduled for liberal arts classes that sounded rather dreadful.
It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she was getting out, and she was in control.
Not. Him.
At last the day came when she couldn’t hide her decision any longer. At that point, the payments had been made and the documents signed, and if she tried to get out now she would have to pay some serious fees. There was no way she was going to do that–no. freaking. way.
When her dad found out what Helena had done, he raged for an hour straight without taking a breath, throwing up his hands and pointing a very accusatory finger in her face.
“This is exactly why I chose to keep you at home! Your direct defiance and insubordination are reason enough for you to stay here, where you can be properly disciplined. I cannot believe this. I absolutely cannot believe this.”
Outwardly she displayed a cool countenance, her face hard as a rock and her mouth cemented in a straight, unforgiving line. Inwardly, however, she leaned back with a smug grin, completely and totally satisfied with what she had done.
This was it. Her life was finally her choice.
And she decided to live it.
the Story Café 
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