On Choice, Will, and Freedom

On my balcony is a pot of sage I have been growing for years.

I watch it grow, trying not to interfere too much.

There was a year with so little summer rain that the whole plant seemed to have died.

But its roots must have been alive beneath the soil.

When the rain came, leaves began to emerge from the withered branches, one after another. And once again it reached toward the light, spreading its leaves to catch as much of it as possible.

With its battered old branches and new shoots all mixed together, it has become a plant that would hardly be called “beautiful” in the usual sense.

No matter how many times it nearly dies, the sage reaches toward the sun.

Toward the sun that both keeps it alive and can kill it.

Persistently, again and again.

We could say that this is simply the nature of plants, and perhaps leave it at that.

It extends its branches toward the light, puts down roots, endures the dry spells, and sends out new shoots when conditions allow. Perhaps this is simply how the sage naturally moves to sustain its life.

What about me?

The directions I take to protect my own life and the lives of those around me, and the ways we live. The decisions through which I reach away from anxiety, fear, and pain, toward greater safety, toward what offers an advantage.

Or the directions a group of people chooses so that the group can continue to exist.

Like a plant extending its branches toward the light, I, too, am trying to grow toward what keeps me alive.

And I believe I have chosen that direction “of my own will.”

But when I stop to think about it, I become a little less sure.

The environment I grew up in, past experiences, knowledge I have acquired, the state of my body, desires and fears, someone’s words, the values of society.

Perhaps it is simply my responses to these things that determine the direction in which my branches grow.

Perhaps “will” is merely the name we give to the direction of the branches we extend so that we, or the groups we belong to, can go on living.

Even so, we keep making choices every day.

What to eat.

Who to spend time with.

What to wear.

Where to go.

What to give our time to.

By choosing one thing, we make it part of our reality and move away from the other possibilities.

The time you are spending reading these words could have been spent on something else. But that time will not come back.

In every choice, gaining and giving up exist together.

We may be able to choose again, but we cannot return to the moment of that first choice. Every choice, however small, is made at a moment that comes only once in a lifetime, and carries its own weight.

Of course, we do not make every judgment entirely on our own.

At work, we follow instructions from an organization or a supervisor. We may leave judgments about what is permissible to laws and rules, morality, religious precepts, and social customs.

This can be useful. It eases the burden of having to think everything through from scratch, and those standards often draw on far more past experience and knowledge than any one person could acquire in a lifetime.

So I do not think there is anything wrong with entrusting judgment to others. If we follow after considering it for ourselves, then entrusting the decision to someone else is itself a choice.

But there are also things we cannot quite say we chose for ourselves.

What our parents taught us as children, for example, can become the foundation of our judgments before we realize it. We did not choose that foundation. Even if it causes us pain as adults, it may not be easy to move away from it.

We may not even see that there are other ways to choose.

Once we become aware of this, though, what we do from there becomes a matter for our own judgment. Even if we cannot change things straight away, perhaps there is room to begin trying a different approach.

And some things happen in our lives regardless of any choice we make.

War, for instance, can change our lives at their very foundations, though we neither wanted nor chose it. I am not suggesting that we should search our consciences as though we were responsible for that, too.

Yet we experience both what we chose and what we had no choice in as things that happen in our own lives. No one can live that experience in our place.

And so we take what has happened to us as part of the life that is ours to live.

This does not mean approving of what happened or believing that everything is our own fault. Resisting, escaping, asking someone for help: all of these, too, are ways of living this life.

The sage on the balcony extends its branches toward the light.

We would probably not call that “will.”

Human beings find a direction by responding to something, avoiding something, seeking something. And we call that movement “our own will.”

Where, really, does the difference lie?

Is there a difference at all?

Choosing for myself, and letting the current carry me. I cannot quite tell where that boundary lies, either.

Nor is what happens at the tips of the branches I have extended mine alone to determine.

Even so, I am the one who experiences what happens there.

So I choose.

Or I let go.

Some things happen without my having a choice.

Still, I remain aware that I have room to choose, and I take both what I chose and what I had no choice in as part of the life that is mine to live. I have come to be at peace with that.

Perhaps, for me, that is what freedom means.

Tosei Shinabe