New Years Choice

When I started this blog in October, I had the idea that I would write for a month or two and then develop some kind of cohesive-ness, be it reoccurring themes or some overarching structure, to give the blog more traction. So, about a month ago, I decided I had enough ideas to boil things down and make this restructuring a reality. I started writing down my summary, hoping to reveal it in a day or two.

40 pages, littered with wikipedia entries, mantras and all capital pep talks later, I am giving up, for now, on trying to have an overall point. I'm too all over the place to try and simmer things down. And, like everything, this has applications to my life overall.

Every minute, we're choosing one specific thing over the infinite. Most of the time, our choices are basically unconscious. Sitting on the couch, not the chair. But even our conscious decisions, most of the time, seem on some level to be out of our control, be they comforts, habits, addictions, or just the myriad of things that we repeat enough times to then consider them a part of our personality, something definite and tangible that we can hold on to as ourselves. But all they are, all they ever are, are choices.

Choices are unbearable to me. Whenever I feel conscious of a decision, it's like two halves of myself split, and I see these two people I could be in my mind's eye. And then, somehow, I'm suppose to pick the person I'm suppose to be? I think the hardest choices are the ones that are the contours of our contradictions, that force us to come to terms with the parts of ourselves that are more easily made separate. As soon as I begin to lean towards someone, the other side of the choice pulls me back, reminding me of these parts of myself I'm cutting off.

This unbearable weight of choice almost always leaves me static. But I think my biggest confusion is that this stasis, too, is a choice. Time doesn't allow us the luxury of decision making, every moment is us making our decision. I wish I knew right now what this blog was meant to be about. I wish I had some definite way to sum it all up, but right now that's too hard. Instead, all I have is the choice to write at all, and the resolve to do it. Even when choices seem impossible, the choice between action or inaction is simple. Not to say it's easy. It's always easier to do nothing, but I at least know that at the end of the day, I want to be someone who chose something. Here's the first post in honor of that choice, of the new year. And to my prayer that everyone can chose that something they've been putting off---no matter how long!