Into Utter Madness - The Choice Is Yours

A recent Facebook argument has got me in a bit of a lather. In my extreme boredom over the weekend I watched the beginning of a program about how to avoid shark attacks (seems pretty obvious to me really, but there are those who don't seem to understand the correlation between being in the ocean and being bit by alpha predators). One story was of a woman who, at seven months pregnant, made the conscious decision to life guard on a beach in waters that she knew had a heightened threat of shark attack on that particular day. But, by her own admission, as well as the admission of her husband (the baby's father), she chose to go that day because she was going to do whatever she wanted to.

That's irresponsible, and I said so. Someone had suggested (before I added the information about it being her choice) that maybe she couldn't afford not to. I told him that there is always a choice. I was then informed that there are, apparently, circumstances that are beyond choice...

That is wrong. There is always a choice. Your options may suck, but you always have a choice. As I told this guy, even if someone holds a gun to your head and tells you to, "do this," (where "this" is something unpleasant) or they will kill you, you still have a choice! Sure, your options are horrible, but you still have them. Whatever happens once you've made your choice is not a choice, it's the consequence of your choice.

Don't confuse choice with consequence, because they are different. You will always have a choice, what you must deal with after that choice is the consequence.

Perhaps you think that someone wrapping their car around a pole is an unavoidable choice. It is not. It is simply the consequence of a choice that person made earlier.

Everything we do is by choice. Remember that Rush song, Freewill? "[Even] if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." The only time we no longer have a choice is when we, ourselves, have taken that away. Everything in life is a choice, we must simply decide which consequences we can live with.