Making Choices

One of the biggest concerns when making a decision that represents a major change in life is obviously how it effects both yourself and your family. The biggest decision we ever make in our lives is the one we make upon the realization that we alone are responsible for our own choices. Before you ever make any decision of import, you have to first recognize it inherently lies within your own make up the ability to make such a choice.

Many people never reach that point in their lives. While many people wake up one morning with the idea that they can indeed decide for themselves what to do in their lives, many more people probably never make it to that point. It is still not uncommon to come across people who have never left their birthplace or childhood home. They are born, raised, live, and eventually die in the same place. Often these people never make a conscious choice to do so. Rather, the inability to make a choice of life altering consequence is abrogated in exchange for a continuity and ease. It is often easier to make no choice and simply accept what comes to a person without effort.

I am not trying to say that people who never leave their place of origin are all universally incapable of making a life changing decision. The fact is often those people have come to the individual choice that their life altering decision is to indeed remain close to their origin. But the examples offered by many people who never make a major life altering choice are cases such as not wanting to risk making the wrong choice.

It is a big deal to choose to leave home for college for example. The choice to get married. The choice to move from one state or region to another. The choice of leaving a family business for a far flung dream. In these examples, you have a case where the alternatives are often easier and often require no effort on the part of the person making them.

By way of example I offer my sister in law. She and my wife are close in age. They grew up in Warner Robbins, Georgia. Very small military town with little else in the way of culture or uniqueness apart from service industry jobs and the occasional high school football game. Do not think that I consider living in a small town to be silly or provincial. Rather, understand that what I am trying to impart here is her adoption of a small vista by default. There isn’t much to the town except a single street with strip mall after strip mall filled with services that focus on the military community. There are indeed great people who live there by choice. But my sister in law lives there not by choice, but instead she lives there by default.

Yes, her parents live there. Yes, she still lives with some of her friends she grew up with. But when she had the opportunity to make a choice to expand her vista she neither chose to implicitly attempt to expand them or limit them. In a sense life just happened to her. She chose to go to a small college and live at home with her family because she didn’t even consider applying anywhere until it became obvious that her sister who did choose to leave home was becoming a successful college student far from home. She even chose her profession by default.

Many of her choices were not choices at all but rather emulation of her sister on a small scale. She bought a house when my wife did. She bought a car when my wife did. She became a nurse because my wife did. She even planted roses and put up a fence because my wife did. What is really creepy is when she found out that my wife and I were announcing our engagement at Christmas, she went from being the world’s best spinster to not only having a boyfriend, but also being knocked up in the space of two weeks. What is even creepier is she found a man with the same last name as mine.

But I digress. My point in bringing her up is that she is a prime example of a person who has never actually thought about, planned or in any way managed her own choices. The emulation of my wife’s choices by her sister is pathetic ultimately because my sister in law wasn’t making these choices out of personal striving but rather to maintain parity on some level with her sister.

Now compare that to how my wife did things. She chose to leave home because she realized that the world view of her family and by extension her little town was insular at best. She took the huge risk to leave home and rely on herself. She chose to be a nurse in a very difficult arena, namely intensive trauma care. It is very different from being a simple floor nurse. It is also something that you must intentionally try to get the credentials for. My wife chose to buy a house because she wanted to have something to show for her efforts while she decided what she should do next in her career.

Of course she didn’t plan on me or Alex coming into her life. But ever since I have known her, the degree of thought and the depth of planning she takes towards all things in our lives is profound. When we discuss her family and her sister, it is often with regret. The regret is that they assume incorrectly that we plan for nothing and they resultantly say and do things that make our choices seem inferior.

Fact is at this point we let the results of our choices speak for themselves.

Obviously, and especially, in the last few months we have had to make many choices of great weight since the fire. And in those choices almost every one of them were ultimately decided by how it will effect our son. For us, the consideration of either my wife’s parents or my own are simply not an issue. It would take too long to adequately explain why they are of minimal importance. The fact remains however, that when we make a decision our own parents aren’t a concern.

Without giving you a list of things we decided to do and not do, I will instead offer you the guidelines we used. The first was whether our choice would enable our son to have more options than we had with our own lives. The second was would the choice give him stability to be able to independently choose his own path in life. The last was would the choice make our family stronger both now and in the future.

It really was that simple.