Medium or large? Beef or chicken? Coke or Pepsi? Porsche or Benz?
Okay, we admit that none of us on the Editorial Board confronts that last one, but the fact is that everyone has to make choices constantly. Most are small ones, probably of little consequence, but think back, and you’ll find a hundred little choices in the 10 minutes before a car accident, for instance, that would have kept you from being in that place at that moment: stop (or don’t) at the yellow, yield (or don’t) to the merging traffic, stop (or don’t) at the market, etc.
We’re reminded of the classic Ray Bradbury story “A Sound of Thunder,” in which just one butterfly inadvertently killed in a prehistoric time led to a dramatically different present. Science fiction writers love to speculate about “alternate timelines,” as do we all, frankly. Call it daydreaming or hindsight, that’s what we do when we ponder, “What if ….”
Some choices we know are big: whom to date, what job to take, where to live. But our point is that even the seemingly little choices can be big, too.
Life is like … driving across a city where every street is one-way. “Oh, there it was,” you say, looking back, “that’s where we wanted to go!” Sorry, can’t turn around. That place you wanted to visit, the situation you wanted to have – it’s gone! Maybe there’s another one very similar up ahead, and maybe you can get to that one, but the one you passed, that moment in time, is gone, forever.
Only humans, alone among the Earth’s creatures, have such awareness and can make such choices. Highly intelligent animals (none more so than our dogs, of course) don’t have a whole lot of choices, driven as they are by instinct and conditioning. But we humans, we truly have our future in our own hands. Terrifying for some, perhaps, but we’re thrilled to have choices. It’s said that God could have made us perfect – instead He made us free.
And with our free will, we can defer immediate gratification for something more important later, whether swimsuit season or business opportunity. The choice is ours, and we are so lucky to find ourselves in this nation, at this time, where choices, big and small, do truly abound.
Some big choices are being played out now on the national stage, with the Presidential candidates’ selection of running mates. For better or worse, Barack Obama and John McCain made significant choices in Joe Biden and Sarah Palin. Leaving aside our own politics, we note how important these choices are; despite the inertia in government bureaucracies, either administration would take our country in a direction quite different from the other. It will be interesting to see how these choices play out. And as we noted earlier, going back is not an option.
Are we pleased with all the choices we’ve made, personally? No, certainly we’ve learned some things from experience. But we try not to look back. Dwelling on regrets only makes it tougher to face forward, which we have to do. In our view, time is a one-way street.
