(35) What I learned about Choice

This is another one I have been meaning to write for a while but I seemed more appropriate to follow a posting on Brian Keenan. His vow to ‘Choose Joy’ has resonated with me for years and, though it is harder to remember to do it at times, it still can serve to alleviate some of the harder moments in life.

Many years ago my lovely Ma told me the phrase ‘This Too Shall Pass’ which has also served me well but, maybe as its origins are with Buddha, is has a ring of passivity about it. To recognise that both the good and the bad times are passing phases does aid perspective but it does treat them as things that are happening to you, rather than you actively participating in them. The phrase Choose Joy implies an active embracing of whatever comes your way because the good, bad and the ugly are all forms of life and to experience them is to be alive. If Brian Keenan and his co-captive John McCarthy can learn to relish even the most horrific of incarcerations and the most sadistic of captors then I’m sure our troubles can be viewed in the same way.

McCarthy is quoted in an interview in 2004: “… there was a joy in seeing how one could choose to be undaunted in the most frustrating and frightening times—something so simple, pure, and alive! The purpose of living, in that extreme circumstance, was simply to live, to experience, and to share what one could.”

If we can choose our emotions, our reactions and therefore our responses we would all be living in calmer, quieter times. And it does sound too convenient to be real, but imagine how your life would be if you experienced all your emotions, but didn’t attach too much significance to them. You simply allowed them to happen and observed yourself living your life …

 I bang on about it all the time and am by no means an example of how to apply any life motto, but it strikes me more and more that really our ‘purpose’, if there is such a thing, is to relish what we have, whilst we have it.