Choice as practice

 This follows on from the previous post about choices and habits, and is a new perspective that only just occurred to me.

Throughout my adult life I've thought that the meaning, or soul, or — I suppose — value of our life amounted to the sum total of the choices we made with the material our circumstances offered. 

I saw that our path was formed by recurring choices, and that strength lay in choice.

There was an occasion when, on the bus travelling the five miles from Bexhill to Hastings at the end of the school day, some schoolboys thought it would be hilarious to sellotape the arm of one of their number to one of the poles on the top deck for people to hold onto to steady themselves and through which the wiring runs for the bell to stop the bus. Like the orange poles in this picture.

So they did this, and they all thought it was funny, and they laughed and the boy laughed. They went round and round and round his arm with the sellotape, attaching it to the pole.

And then the bus came to their stop, and all the boys left laughing — except the one sellotaped to the pole, who only then realised his predicament. He shouted to his friends but they just laughed and got off, and he was left behind as the bus pulled away.

And I thought that, right there, was what Thich Nhat Hanh used to call habit energy, the power of methodical repetition of a choice laid down to determine an outcome, a path, and a future.

If they had gone round his arm once with the sellotape, he could have easily broken free. It was the repetition, thin layers laid down by repeated action, that ensured the choice would hold firm.

So I am used to that idea.

But my focus was the power of habit, the repetition consolidating simple choice into first a discernible path and at last into character — a defining trait.

This reminds me of when I wrote my book In Celebration of Simplicity, about living simply, the power of a quiet, humble, lowly life, accessible to all of us. It was some years later before I realised I'd missed a crucial stage — that you have to actually give things up if you're going to take the way of simplicity. Once that dawned on me, I wrote my book Relinquishment, which should have been written first; it was a kind of prequel to the simplicity book. It was my first self-published book, because no publisher was interested in it or thought anyone would want to read it. And they were right, not many people do — but it was still worth writing, not for the sales figures but because it's important, relinquishment is a crucial step towards a simple life which is in turn essential as a — the — portal to freedom. 

I had a similar epiphany about choice and habit. Yes, I knew that repeated choice creates habit which lays down path which establishes character — but I always thought the choice part would be easily available, it would just be a matter of finding the motivation to make the choice.

I have lived through a time period of abundant and increasing choice. The years between when I was born and grew into an adult saw the emergence and increase of mass production and global economy. The chain stores of the high street did not exist when I was a small child. The internet didn't arrive until I was well into adulthood, and social media several years after that.

I remember when I was a young mother in Hastings — which is a pocket of poverty within East Sussex which is a pocket of poverty within the south east of England — watching schoolchildren walking to school in the rain and cold without coats because coats were expensive. Once mass production ramped up and all the supermarket chains developed their own clothing range, all the children had coats.

Possibility, information, choice — I've watched these steadily increase.

I thought choice was important, morally and politically because of the habit energy: what we choose strengthens. So, for example, I chose to buy fair-trade goods and organic food and artisan-made artefacts, because I wanted to strengthen ecological and social wellbeing and creativity. Later, once mass production had almost engulfed us, I chose to buy second-hand clothes, to strengthen the reduction of waste and the habit of thrift ('thrift' and 'thrive' come from the same etymological root).

But since 2020 we have moved into an era of rapid and radical change. The freedom to choose is now itself being intentionally eroded. Yes, we still have mass-production and a consumer society, but we are being inexorably herded towards an unquestioning attitude of mind, relinquishing choice in favour of compliance. 

Increasingly we see those who dissent from accepted perspectives ghosted and shunned and even imprisoned. Internet algorithms keep us enclosed in informational spheres, and society is polarising into antagonistic tribes. Turned against each other, I see people fiercely adopting tribal cries, making unquestioned assumptions, relinquishing curiosity in favour of acceptance. 

Even the search engines of the internet, once such a cornucopia of access to information, now return only options filtered through a mainstream lens.

I realise now that making a choice is itself a spiritual practice. 

As compliance is ever more rigidly required, as dissent grows increasingly costly, as finding our own path and building a non-approved life is made ever more difficult, just to make a choice at all becomes hard to do. Don't believe me? Try saying something nice about President Trump when you sit down for coffee and a chat with your politically Left-leaning friends. Try defending Tommy Robinson (once you've taken the patient time and trouble to trace what he actually did and said and the actual nature of his offences) with anyone. Try explaining the negative efficacy of flu and Covid vaccinations. 

Three times in recent weeks a socialist friend has held out to me the comparison of President Trump and the Republican Party with a zit. I was meant to laugh, or give some kind of favourable response. I didn't. So she kept offering me the opportunity. During this last year, when my granddaughter visited she asserted, just in conversation and for no obvious reason, that she hates President Trump (though she didn't include the courtesy of the word 'President'). I didn't respond. So later in the visit, she said it again: "I am a person who hates Trump". 

I know why she repeated it — it was because I didn't take the first opportunity to laugh and join in, so it was offered me a second time.

And what a feeble choice I made, with both these people; no more than the choice to pass up an opportunity, to remain silent. But we are living in times when we are supposed to pick sides. I don't want to lose my friend, or alienate my granddaughter, so silence was my only other option, so narrow has the field of choice become.

Therefore I think that it has become both urgent and important that we realise choice is a use-it-or-lose-it muscle. In a social terrain characterised increasingly by complicity, that we exercise choice at all is now an essential part of our spiritual practice. If we do not do this, our souls will die.

As we are shepherded by our political leaders into a digital matrix of surveillance and control over the course of the next three years, the options available to us will become ever fewer.

Freedom as we once knew it is dwindling rapidly.

It is essential that we continue to treasure and exercise the power to choose, even if we see our range of choice shrink.

Looking back to the concentration camps of the National Socialist Party in World War 2, we see what it is to exercise choice within narrow confines.

Hugo Gryn — a Reform rabbi from the UK — told a story of how in the concentration camp at Auschwitz his father hoarded his precious store of fat to make a light for Hanukkah. When Hugo protested, his father said, “You have seen that it is possible to live three weeks without food. Once we went three days without water. But you cannot live for even three minutes without hope.”

And then there was Maximilian Kolbe, a Franciscan friar also in Auschwitz, who made the choice to offer himself in exchange for another prisoner selected for a group to be starved to death in an underground bunker. He actually died of lethal injection when the guards got impatient with waiting for the group of prisoners to starve.

How narrow, how small, was the range of options; but how resonant was the choice these two men made. What spiritual power lay in making the choice they did.

So for us, as we see the range of options gradually reduce — and whatever happens politically, it will anyway as we grow old — it is so important that we recognise and continue to exercise the power to choose, or we will forget how to do it, and sink into apathy and fear. 

"God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power and of love, and of a sound mind." [2 Tim.1.7]

The practice now, I think, is to make choices — quietly, not aggressively — and hold fast to them, and (as the Tao says) find a way, like water, to flow round the blocks. 

Walk quietly, but walk in freedom. Maximilian Kolbe showed us that even in Auschwitz it can be done.