Choices

There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.
                                                                --Henry David Thoreau

Life presents us an endless string of choices. While some are really big, most are so mundane we don't even recognize them as a choice at all - say, whether you brush or floss first.

Of course, there are an infinite number of choices we fail to recognize not because they are mundane but because we've been programmed - make that, conditioned - to ignore them. Just this morning I could have woken up and started singing "Oh What a Wonderful Morning" at the top of my lungs while mercilessly tickling Tricia awake. However, I subconsciously know there's a very good chance I'd receive a swift knee to the groin so my mind skips over this choice without my conscious self even realizing it. More realistically I could have ridden my bike to the grocery store this morning, packed the groceries into the bike trailer, and pedaled back home all in the name of fresh air, exercise, and conservation. But this falls outside of my normal routine so I never considered doing so.

Life's big choices weigh on us more heavily. Where to go to school. What to study. Who to marry. Where to live. What church to go to. How to spend, or maybe even save, our money. How we make each of these choices says a lot about us. In many ways these choices define us - if not for ourselves, at least for others.

I chose to go to Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville because it was what we could afford. I chose to study education because journalism was not what I thought it would be and I remembered how much I enjoyed kids. I chose to marry Tricia because she was kind, smart, fun, and pretty (At the time I started with pretty and let the other reasons reveal themselves along the way). I chose not to go to church because I realized that any god who would let my dad suffer so much in one lifetime deserved neither my love nor my  faith. We choose to spend our money, when possible, on experiences rather than things.

Some choices are easier to make than others. There's a quote I like that goes "If you limit your choices to only what seems possible or reasonable you disconnect yourself from what you truly want and all that is left is compromise." Compromise is easy. And safe.

I was thinking about this yesterday as I watched the kids jump from our new dock into the lake. The water was so cold it would have been easier to dangle their feet in and splash around a bit. That's what the grown-ups did. But while we chose to wait until summer when the water is less likely to emit an initial scream of discomfort, the kids chose to jump right in because it was exactly what they wanted to be doing at that very moment of time. No amount of cool breezes or chill bumps were about to keep them from their fun.

Seeing them splashing and laughing out in the water made me think, too, about how happy we've all been since we moved here into the country. Swinging from tire swings, building fires, and looking out into nights so black you wonder if there's anything out there at all. Moving here, that was a choice too. A choice that at the time was not easy. It was definitely not safe. But it was right.

I ran back to the house to grab my camera so I could capture some of the things that remind me how much I love living and playing in the woods. In the meantime we'll think on other big choices that seem, at least right now, to be impossible.