Reflecting back, the places where this work was most profound for me were mostly in seemingly mundane ways. Without question, I had a whole bunch of advantages on my side. Nevertheless, I was living out what 19th-century English anarchist Edward Carpenter once wrote so powerfully, “To pass through one’s mortal days … under continual compulsion from others, is not to live; it is only to exist.” Realizing that no one was “making me” do any of those things changed my life. To own the decision to get up early to prepare for the day rather than blame others for scheduling a meeting in the morning; to own my decision to be kind to the cashier at a coffee shop; to realize that I could decide not to go to innocuous social occasions I didn’t enjoy rather than feeling forced to attend. To stop myself from complaining about cold winter weather and own that I was choosing to go out to run in it regardless. To embrace that I was deciding to engage with difficult service situations rather than feeling like “I had to.”
Free choice, to be clear, does not mean, “Do whatever you want, others be damned.” It means owning that I have decided to do whatever it is I am doing—and the mindset with which to approach it—even when, as is often the case, I may well not really want to do it. Yes, of course, social pressure, financial implications, the expectations of others, etc. are always at play. But the point is the same. Going along grudgingly, I learned, is exhausting. I know because I unwittingly lived it. Timothy Snyder says, “Most of the power of authoritarians is freely given.” Physically, I was living in a democracy, but I was freely giving up my internal power every day.
Choosing to consciously own my own choices—even in the smallest of situations—changed my life. And on a bigger scale, as Peter Koestenbaum conveys over and over again in his writing, we choose our values. As he writes, "Inconsiderateness may be a small defect … [but it] is the seed which, when fully grown, becomes the cruelty of war.” Deciding to act (or not) with compassion, empathy, generosity of spirit, humility, and dignity is also a choice.
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