#196 - Choice and obligation
Difference between life that happens to you and life that you make happen
Each of you, dear readers, has a unique definition of normal. Some things that are hard for others may be easy for you, and some that others take for granted may be hard for you. How do you feel when you do the second category of things?
I’ll tell you how I do, or used to: crappy.
You want to lose weight. You put yourself on a regimen, say no to your favorite things, and finally nudge the scale in the right direction. In the middle of this good run, a holiday comes up. One week of beer breakfasts and those Saturn-like rings around your middle are back.
Holidaying with you is a good friend who runs on a different metabolic clock. Same age as you, mostly doesn’t care about what she eats or drinks, looks exactly the same after holidays.
If how you look matters to you, envy probably is a mild emotion. Underneath it all, you believe that life’s not fair. So when this friend offers you hot chips from that neighborhood store you love, you turn your face away and say, “No—I have to get back on my diet.”
Robert Fritz, composer and author of several books on how to change your behavior by changing the structure of your life, writes:
A real choice means we can do it (whatever the it is) or not. If you must do it, you have no choice. Some people use the word “choice,” but they don’t really mean you can do it or not. Sometimes they think that a choice is forced upon you, and if you don’t do whatever the it is, you will pay a price until you wise up, and finally make “the right choice.” The thought here is “yes, you have a choice to get it wrong, pay the consequences, and finally come to your senses and do the right thing.”
Probably, this strikes a chord. Getting back to your diet feels like that kind of a right choice. It’s the only right thing, isn’t it? You’ve got to do it.
God forbid you get a rare disorder, some sort of an idiopathic autoimmune thing that flares up when least expected. When you have an episode, life comes to a halt.
The doc prescribes a list of daily meds to manage your condition, probably some dietary restrictions too. Life takes a turn. You find it harder to manage your energy. Those holidays are no longer the same. You’re bookended on either side by your children and your parents. In the years ahead, you want to be healthy for your family as much as for yourself. You tell yourself, “I have to do this for my family.” And you do.
When your condition flares up and you don’t find the world sensitive to your situation, you feel it’s not fair. It’s not fair that you have to go through all this while the rest of the world has it easy-peasy.
It may feel like, in either of the described scenarios, you’ve no choice. Says Fritz, “But in life we do have many choices we can make. Some of these choices can make all the difference.”
When we feel we must do things and these must-do things go bad, be it managing weight or a long-term health condition, it is hard to take responsibility for the consequences. Because we don’t believe we have made a choice. The choice, if at all, has been thrust on us, and so have the consequences. Neither are ours. It feels like an out-of-body experience we have no control over. Sounds familiar? It did to me for most of my life.
Fritz suggests we make a fundamental choice—”fundamental choices are about orientation, states of being, the ground you stand on.” One such choice could be: I choose to be healthy.
Here’s Fritz talking about it:
When it comes to health, we are not all created equally. Some of us are, by nature, healthier than others. Our starting point is whatever it is. But, that having been said, all of us can still make the fundamental choice to be healthy. What exactly does that mean? It means that we take on the job of creating health for ourselves. Most of us do not do that. I didn’t do that until I was in my late thirties. I, like most of us, somehow had the notion that my body was kind of like a car. If I got sick, I would bring my body to the doctor in the same way we bring our cars to the mechanic. It is the mechanic’s job to fix the car, and it was the doctor’s job to fix the body. I was just a passive consumer. Once I had made the fundamental choice to be healthy, I was the one, and the only one, whose job it was to see to it that I created health for myself. Others could help by their advice, their medical service, their research, and their support. But, truth was, it simply wasn’t their job, or responsibility, to see to it that I was healthy.
[….]
Once a fundamental choice like this is made, our orientation changes. We cannot play the passive victim of circumstances. We have the critical role in how we live our lives, on the primary and secondary choices we make, on changing habits that do not support our health, and on adopting habits that do. No one else is pulling the strings. Life may deal us a different situation than others, but it is our job to see to it personally that we make the most of the raw material we are given.
Fritz uses the word commitment to suggest the opposite of a free choice. Which is whenever people arm-twist themselves into doing the right thing. They don’t choose it; instead, they feel they must do it. I will use the word obligation to describe this. If you feel obligated to do something, you have to follow through. There’s no choice for you to make. You’re at the mercy of your circumstances. You’re an inch away from announcing yourself as “poor me” to the world and absolving yourself of all responsibility for your life.
Getting out of the clutches of such a thinking groove can be very powerful.
Once you make a fundamental choice, everything changes, even if everything looks the same. You are on solid ground and you no longer are subject to the changing circumstances that life brings. Your creative process is driven by the generative love of the outcomes you desire to bring into the world, and the situations you find yourself in are simply the raw material you begin with.
We can do the same thing either as a choice or as an obligation. Whether we choose or not matters. There’s a profound difference between a life that happens to you and a life that you make happen.
👋Hi! I’m Satyajit and thank you for reading my work. Writing is the main medium of creation for me. I also use my skills as a decision-making trainer and as a coach to create shifts in perspective in my clients’ lives and help them reach their highest potential.