I feel assaulted by the unrelenting television, radio and print commercials for the race to the White House, but yesterday I voted in a local primary election in a simple elementary school classroom. We all stood in line to vote the privilege of being able to participate in a democracy with our fellow citizens. The volunteers and my fellow voters seemed to share the sense that we again could choose.
Few things define our live more than the choices we make. I believe our life is shaped by two factors--where we focus our attention (you are your attention), and our choices, the thousands of simple and sometimes complex decisions we make every day.
We often focus on the "big" choices: who to date, to marry, the right job, car, apartment, house or vacation. But we forget that our lives are shaped by the intersection of our choices and where we focus on attention. Today's world offers us more choices but, ironically, less satisfaction.
To live with purpose requires that we become more choice-conscious, that we decode our own choice-making process, and "get" that each choice carries its' own baggage...once you buy it, it has to be paid for, lugged, stored, lived with, lost, discarded, forgotten, or, occasionally, celebrated. Choices aren't lost. You own them. They shape you and, with bad choices, that can dim your hopes and defer your dreams. Every choice counts.
Our media and on-line channels relentlessly push competing candidates, products and tease new experience choices at us at a dizzying pace, and the 90-foot shelves and sagging display tables in our department and grocery stores speak to the robust product engines pushing choices and creating a sort of exhausting and dissembling visual pollution. In the film Moscow on the Hudson, Robin Williams plays a Communist-era Russian defector in New York City. In a memorable scene, he goes to a supermarket for coffee; encountering an aisle full of different brands of coffee to choose from, he faints from the overload, mumbling the word "coffee" over and over.
Had Marco Polo had access to a PathMark or a Safeway, he could have been a world-class explorer without traveling anywhere. (For breakfast alone, he could have discovered nine kinds of Cheerios.) With so many options to choose from, the poor man would scarcely have had time to get out of town.
Time is only one of many hidden costs of abundance to our society, according to Swarthmore social psychologist Barry Schwartz in his book, The Paradox of Choice. "As a culture, we are enamored of freedom, self-determination, and variety, and we are reluctant to give up any of our options," he writes with characteristic directness. "But clinging tenaciously to all the choices available to us contributes to bad decisions, to anxiety, stress, and dissatisfaction - even to clinical depression."
Were life limited to shopping for chocolate chip cookies and Cheerios, such a claim might seem exaggerated, if not absurd. But, as Schwartz documents, we enter an equivalent supermarket of options when deciding where we want to live, for whom we want to work, and even how we want to look.
To decode our choice mechanism, it helps to Choose What To Choose. This means deciding which choices in your life really matter and can having a lasting impact. When you focus on those choices, you surrender a lot of others. Let them go. Now you can focus your energy and attention on the Level One Choices.
Try this:
* Make a list of the decisions you made in the past week, large and small (the new jacket, a winter vacation, an investment, another dinner with that special person).
* Examine how much time you spent each of those decisions, what pleasure or anxiety you felt with each one. What "research" did you do?
* How did it feel to be more conscious of the "subtext", the internal wiring of your thinking and the prickly feelings that may have surfaced when you examined your decisions?
Author Debbie Ford suggests that to make more conscious decisions we may need to give up the quick hit, the feel-good moments, and sometimes, that we need to surrender our attachment to always doing it our way. She writes, "we must stay present in our dreams and desires and bring awareness to our choices." This is grown up stuff.
What did each decision "cost" you? Can you surface some "new rules" for making better decisions...maybe, taking more time, doing more research, sleeping on it first?
This exercise can seem awkward at first, but it's an important step to becoming conscious and more disciplined. Coming to consciousness is not without discomfort, for it also means we have to take responsibility for our choices. We broke it. We own it.
William Glasser, M.D, the author of Choice Theory, suggests that the only person whose behavior we control is our own, that choices are critical to healthy relationships, that what happened in the past has everything to do with what and who we are today, and that we are, really, "verbs." Our feelings, even our physiology and health, are related to how we act, think and choose.
So, choices really count.