Powerful Choices

When I was fourteen, I was playing touch football with my family one afternoon when I found myself thinking about how often we, as a group, worried about things. Worry seemed like self-generated fear, and I never wanted to be afraid. Yet it seemed like Kenowers had made some familial agreement that worrying is just what we did. What if I simply didn’t? I thought. What if I just decided not to worry about stuff?

That question immediately changed my relationship to worry. I was still susceptible to it, but from then on it became easier and easier to stop worrying, to understand that I was literally choosing to make myself uncomfortable, to weaken myself.

When I was twenty, I was a dating a girl and it wasn’t going well. We didn’t seem to have that much in common other than we both wanted to date someone. We were talking about ourselves one night and I mentioned how I got depressed from time to time. “I never get depressed,” she said.

“What do you mean? How can you not get depressed?”

“I just decide not to be depressed.”

“You can’t just choose not to be depressed.”

“I do.”

I can’t date someone this shallow, I thought. Despair, which had been a frequent companion of mine already for many years, wasn’t a choice. Despair was a natural consequence of accepting reality. Those other days, the ones when I was hopping merrily along, those were lived in a fog of delusion sustained by an unstable belief. But then you learn the truth, and you just have to deal with it.

Until, that is, a few days go by and you feel all right, and you think, “Oh, everything’s fine,” and you don’t reflect on the difference between one day and another. I ended up marrying someone prone to worry but not despair. She is someone, however, who likes reflecting on the difference between one day and another, and after a couple decades of living with her I could not help wondering about my allegiance to despair.

Of all people, someone who spends every day asking himself what he’d like to see on a blank page ought to know reality is what you choose to make it. Once you see something as a choice, it’s power over you dissolves. Now, like it or not, the power’s yours, and there is only the question of what you will choose to do with it.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual coaching and group workshops.

Fearless Writing: How to Create Boldly and Write With Confidence.
You can find William at: williamkenower.com