Choosing

Samantha Masterton

August 5, 2007

When trying to choose a topic for this service, I flailed around for quite a long time, feeling nervous and overwhelmed and regretful that I had ever agreed to speak in the first place. I bring this up not to garner sympathy or express my regret at being here today, but to point out a very important part of my decision-making process. It seems that every time I have a choice to make, there is a blurry period … or maybe it would be best to call it a flurry period … in which I cannot think about the choice with anything resembling progress. My thoughts become jumbled, and I am immediately overwhelmed by any hint of the choice to be made. I try my best to put the choosing out of my mind until this flurry period passes and I am able to settle down and settle my thoughts down and figure things out.

Which brings me to my first point about choosing: I do not claim to be very good at it. Nor am I very consistent in my methods. I claim an “organic” method that alters with mood, weather, timing, the weight of the choice I am making. But I have done a lot of choosing in my lifetime, and a lot of BIG choosing at that. I chose to leave my first career of twelve years as a manager in record stores (Remember record stores back in the day?). I chose to attend the university at the age of 29 so I could become a teacher. I chose to leave the best boyfriend I ever had for a devil woman. I chose to quit smoking. I chose to start again. I chose to quit again. I chose to start again. I chose to quit again. I chose to leave the big city of Dallas and a lucrative and successful teaching position behind (I was a geometry teacher). I chose to move to Antigo to be able to be a help to my mother and to have her as a friend and a supporter in my life. I chose to live in the country and close to the lake. And these are just a few choices I’ve made … I mean, how many times do we make choices in a day much less in the last month or year? One hundred? One thousand?

As I examine my different methods of choosing, I invite you to think of choices you have made in your life and what went into the process of arriving at your decisions. I am interested in how you arrived at your choice. Did you talk to people? Did you roll dice? Did you make lists? Did you draw straws? Did it work out? Would you do it that way again? What did you learn in the choosing?

I do have some personal ground rules for choosing … my choosing principles, I guess you could say:

Number one, choose consciously.

Number two, never hurt another person.

Number three, cowboy up.

I break all of those rules consistently, but you have to admit, these are some tough rules. I guess I would be better off calling them goals as opposed to rules. I mean, there is no punishment for breaking them. I do not beat myself up for failing. Think about your own rules for making choices. Do you have any? How do you make your choices?

I have made major decisions with my head, my heart, and my loins. The first two – head and heart – when used properly, have almost always resulted in sound, reasonable, and logical choices. I weighed things very carefully when I decided to quit the record business and get into the teaching business. That was a very emotionally and intellectually calculated life management decision that I came to after long and involved soul-searching, active thought, and discussion with key players. And, after I made the decision, there were about a million choices to be made to see myself through the ten years it took to get through college and the intervening life events.

I also made a head/heart decision to quit my life in Dallas and re-establish myself in Antigo and Wausau. I actively thought about that decision for well over a year before I finally made it, and then it took another year for me to make the choice into a reality. The decision to move here and the decision to become a teacher later in life than usual are just two of a handful of very major life-changing choices I have made. I think my methods of arrival to the choices I just mentioned were focused, organized, and sound, and the results of this active and conscious decision-making were positive. In other words, the more logic and emotional maturity I bring to making a decision, the better the outcome (ordinarily).

Decisions made via my loins, on the other hand, have been more problematic.  For example, I am convinced that I went into debt because of loin choices. My ex-girlfriend, Elisha, loved to shop. She loved to buy things … pretty, expensive things. I was so in love with her. She rocked my world. She had a pulse about her on her worst days, but I really could not resist the heat that would emanate from Elisha when we neared the mall. I could not deny the flushing in her cheeks, the dilating of her pupils, the speeding of her breathing. I will never forget how she would move in close in the fitting room and deliberately not kiss me, and how that deliberate not kiss would just send me reaching for my wallet. That brush of warm, sweet breath on my lips and I would buy her anything. And I did. And I chose to do it, although I could make a pretty strong argument that she held me in her sway.

I also think that every cigarette I ever smoked was a choice at some level. No one held me down at gunpoint and poked a cigarette in my mouth and forced me to inhale it. I could make a case that my smoking was a loin choice. Smoking made me feel good: comforted and supported. I loved the feel of the smoke in my lungs; I loved the actions associated with each cigarette. I found the entire process satisfying and very soothing. I tried to be conscious about my smoking, but loin choices are definitely problematic at the conscious level. I learned to resist the visceral response to the nicotine coursing through my veins (the loins aspect of the choice to smoke). I learned to shift the focus of my smoking to a logical and emotional level (the head and the heart aspects of smoking). By concentrating more on the head and heart, I had a greater chance of reacting to my smoking habit logically and in a mature emotional manner and finally just quitting the shit. And I did. And that is how I did it. I convinced myself it was the right thing to do for so many reasons. I told myself, over and over, that I could not call myself a smart person and smoke at the same time. I shifted the focus; I forced the logic.

 I often argue that it is harder to make difficult choices as a single person. It seems that quitting smoking, for example, would be more difficult as a single and childless person who lives alone. No one nagging, no children to live for, no one person responsible for my medical care if I should develop smoking-related illnesses … it seems that outside pressures would have aided the progress of my quitting. And, when I think about what it took to quit my life in Dallas and make all the arrangements to shift my life up here … if someone had been around to help me, it just seems that things would have been so much easier.   

But, after thinking harder about it, I now believe that being single and childless and living alone makes it much easier for me to make larger personal choices. I remember how it was when I was coupled, and I often wallowed in the status quo, never wanting to rock the boat all that much, savoring the predictability of it all. Being single frees me from the routine of the couple … I get to establish my own existence, and it is not hinged on the wants, moods, or desires of anyone else. I do what I want, and happily, right now I want to be a non-smoker who lives in a small town in the North Woods.

I have arrived, really, at a place where I am no longer choosing against the negatives and using a time-intensive process of elimination to figure out what I want from life. Being among the first generation of women who was not expected to get married and have babies has had its blessings and its curses. The blessing: The whole world was laid at my feet, and I was told I could do anything and be anyone I wanted to be. All I had to do was set my mind to it and work hard. The blessing also included the fact that I was born distinctly uninterested in marriage and having children, so I was born right on time. The curse is that I have lacked a really clear vision of what I surely wanted to do with my life, so I have had to do a lot of experimentation. It hasn’t always panned out, and before I realized that it is the journey and not the destination that matters, I used to feel as if I wasted lots of time, energy, and money trying out things and relationships and situations that didn’t work out. There is a freedom in not choosing, in having your life mapped out for you at birth, in letting someone else map out your life, or in throwing your fate to the wind. The greatest freedom, in my opinion, though, comes when there are no choices to be made, when all logic and emotional maturity and the pull of the loins are not issues. I feel this great freedom when I am completely engaged, and I can fleetingly suspend my attachment to the world and its doings. Stargazing, swimming, biking, walking … all of these activities make me forget that I have a million things yet to decide. I love doing these things to get out of my head and the business of life, but I don’t mind choosing so much these days either. I am no longer using the process of elimination method of mapping my life, and that is a very good thing.

These days I seem to be choosing for the positives and am being more proactive about shaping the course of my existence to suit my needs and wants and to better cater to my happiness. My rules for choosing have been working out OK. I am trying to be conscious about my choices. I try hard to not hurt anyone, and when I screw up or make a bad choice, I try to get tough and cowboy up and move forward into the next choice to be made.

I would like to end my portion of the service today with a poem. You all know this poem, “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, but I would like to offer an alternate reading from what you might have been taught the poem means. Robert Frost claims to have written the poem about his friend, Edward Thomas, with whom he often walked in the woods near London. Frost said Thomas would always fret after they had chosen one path over another, wondering what they might have missed by not taking the other path. The poem is often read as an anthem to individuality and forging your own path, but I see it more as a poem that does NOT moralize about choice, but rather says that making choices is inevitable and that you can’t know what your choice will mean until you have lived it.

(Recite the poem.)

I would like to invite you to share your own experiences with decision making. Consider the process over the outcome. Consider the following questions:

How do you make difficult decisions?

Where do you go for insight? To whom do you go for insight?

What have you learned from bad decisions?

What have you learned from good decisions?

What advice would you give to others about making choices?

Do you have any ground rules for your own choices?

(Participants contributed.)