Choices

It is really easy to be drowned by noise these days. But when everything just shuts the fuck up for a second, you quickly revert to a primal state, where deeply hidden feelings start to resurface. Now, the exact psychology of that, or what I am about to talk about, is a mystery to me, but it is, needless to say, important to me.

How I will get to start to talk about choice is a mystery to me, so I will provide this non sequitur to bring about this post to what I think is one of the most profound and beautiful things about human existence – choice. But my interest lies not in the creations that mankind has made due to the power of choices, but rather, my concern lies within the realms of far more general observations.
These thoughts that I dawned upon recently, came when I was watching, or rather listening to an interview that Philip Seymour Hoffman did on the subject of happiness. At first I thought about whether or not I was happy at this point in my life. However, I quickly realized I wasn’t and moved on, figuring that lingering on such a detail would amount to nothing. But what peaked my curiosity was Hoffman’s death, how he died of a heroin overdose. It is easy to say that such brilliant individuals, and especially actors, succumb to such addictions all the time – a very submissive view towards clichés. However, this removes a lot of the mysteries that are so interesting. What if (of course I cannot say this is true, it is only a hypothetical situation), that Hoffman became addicted to heroin, not because he was a walking cliché of ‘artist depression’, but rather, because of rotten luck? Such a ridiculous hypothetical perhaps suggests the nonexistence of a mystery instead of a perpetuation of one, but then came the question: then how much of our death is choice? How much of our lives revolve around choice? If there is this mystery of chance, of some absolute randomized power that is far beyond our intelligence, then what does choice matter? If we decide to chase after this elusive property of the universe, if we decide to pursue the ‘big questions of life’, then what does it matter what choice we have, if all it leads down to is the absolute – that we will never know?

But I think it is in this very conundrum that choice finds its beauty. We can choose what grants us satisfaction or what we want to grant the power of importance to in our lives. We can let all the unanswerable enigmatic questions leave our faculties, queries which we cannot even begin to understand in the first place, and focus on what makes us happy in each of the individual moments that riddle our lives. A sort of mental relaxation that is paradoxically taxingly active. Perhaps I was watching a movie, saw a child help another child that fell, was just looking at the ocean and a couple of birds tussling for a crab, or watching a dog nap away on the front lawn of a house I walked by. These ephemeral moments of happiness are incredible, because they are so fleeting. Then if it is so fleeting, is my happiness from those moments fleeting as well? I don’t think so. I think we have the ability to hold onto things that are inherently ephemeral. Also, if anything, I find that if you just calm down for a second, these moments come to you more often than you would think. But I think learning to appreciate these small moments of emotional victory, also leads you to an awareness of the beauty found in our saddest moments.
But of course there is the absolute that unifies us all: death. But if we had that, and the knowledge of the universe, the answer to the question, I don’t suppose our lives would be very interesting. In fact, I have to imagine that God is bored – most of the time. I sort of imagine an old man who fell asleep on the couch with the TV on – subconsciously listening to a bunch of white noise. Yet, I don’t think we were ever meant to think in absolutes. It is certainly easy (but at the same time, not really) to think in black and white. But absolutes are terrifying, because we not only accept them easily, but there is an indeterminable power that forces us into believing that they corner us. We are slaves to them essentially, and the ability to understand them is sometimes refused by the very entity that we consider being so specific a law of the universe. We feel the power of its effect, yet its definition eludes us. That is why perhaps when we are robbed of choice by the power of absolutes, we feel cheated, and more importantly in distress.
Perhaps thinking in conjunction with other elements can help dwindle this fact. To consider how nothing exists in isolation in this world. If you successfully understand death, and accept it as something that inevitably happens, you can finally live, because life is invariably connected to death.
I am not saying any of this is easy. By no means do I think that such exercises in conscious choice can be done on such a whim. But I think just the act of thinking of greying what we once considered black and white can help us not so much understand the world more, but enjoy what little we grasp of it. I mean this entire post is an exercise in choice. I am not at all nearer to happiness, but I do feel a sort of energy.
The fact that we as humans have such intellectual liberties is ridiculously beautiful. So why not exercise it more – even if it brings us to dark places, or just makes realize that we have been in the corner the whole time.