
Good Evening, God
The planets and moon are predictable . . . their paths known. Not so we humans who have been given the power to make choices. I hadn’t thought about this as a key part of being human until I read Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning. He was in a German Concentration camp and saw that many people died soon after entering. So he asked a long time surviver how he did it. The man told him that one purposes of the camp was to take away the ability to make choices. He said, I have only four choices: On / Off and In / Out. But, I work at exercising those choices!
That story keeps coming to mind when I think about making choices. And, it reminds me that “not making a choice” IS a choice. I realize that most of my choices are within a fairly narrow range. Habits and patterns prescribe most of my days activities. And I LIKE my comfortable range of choices! I like my life as it is!
But when our grandson, Ian, went to a Climate Rally . . . holding a sign that said, I STAND WITH GRETA . . . it called me to make new choices. This afternoon I put away the two loads of clothes that I had hung up to dry indoors. (We are in a townhouse with no outside clothes line.) Cutting down on using the dryer is such a small thing I’m embarrassed to share it. BUT, it was the third time I’d done it. And I realized that it felt easier this time.
I am becoming conscious of the fact that there ARE choices for me to make. And I’m aware that I have to WORK at making them.
And as I do my small acts of hope I think of Vaclav Havel’s quote: “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
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