Sunday, 11 March 2012

Choices


Life comes down to the choices you make.  I believe that.  I believe everything boils down to simple choices in the end.  No matter how complex someone says the situation is, it boils down to a simple choice.  To choose a political example: the Canadian military presence in Afghanistan.  There are a lot of conflicting priorities and influences but in the end our decision as a country is simple: Do we want to support the Afghani people during their transition to a more egalitarian society or do we want to protect the lives and safety of our citizens?  We can’t do both.  It is a war zone with severe and imminent risks of bodily harm.  In order to support the Afghani people, we have to be there on the ground, doing what is necessary.  Therefore it comes down to a simple choice: help or protect.  I don’t pretend to say one is the right decision but they can’t both happen.

On Dr. Phil, there was a man who preferred to live as if he was an eighteen month old infant.  He had a girlfriend who fed him, bathed him and changed his diapers.  (I’ll give you a moment to recover from the eww factor of that particular revelation.)  I don’t generally like judging other people’s choices but that one was hard to avoid.  She had a hard time explaining why she was with him and kept falling back on saying it was complicated.  But it’s not complicated.  Either she stays with him and accepts that she will never have the kind of relationship she hoped for or she leaves him and deals with being alone.

The choices are simple but the impact is difficult.  When people say a choice is complicated, I think it’s because they know what they should do but don’t really want to do it.  Or they are afraid of the results.  I am sympathetic to that.  There are choices that scar your soul and change your life dramatically.  The options might suck, but there's still a choice.

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