Choices

In the long-running TV game show Let’s Make a Deal, contestants are shown three doors and are asked to choose which one has the grand prize hidden behind it. It’s a gamble, with no certainty of the outcome. But win or lose, a choice must be made.

Door number one … door number two … or door number three?

It seems to me that life is very much like a game show with doors representing decisions to be made along the way.

At every moment of our lives, we’re faced with choices. And these aren’t limited to big life-changing decisions: career, marriage, etc. If we pay attention, we see that we have choices to make at every juncture of every day.

Someone cuts in front of us at the supermarket checkout. How do we react? Do we get into a shouting match? Do we calmly point out that we were in line ahead of them? Do we let the offense slide and figure we have better things to worry about? The choice is ours.

Someone is riding our bumper on the freeway. What do we do? Do we flip them the bird and slam on our brakes to teach them a lesson? Do we coolly maintain our safe speed and ignore the tailgater? Do we pull over into the right lane and let them speed past? Again, the choice is ours.

In the words of Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s way.”

Sometimes it feels that so much of life is out of our control. When I feel like that, I try to remember that we don’t always have full control of events, but we do have control of our choices and our reactions to things. We’re the ones who choose the doors, every minute of the day.

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