The First Choice

Most of us have spent at least a little time creating a pleasing environment to live in. We paint and decorate our rooms, we hang pictures on walls and find the right comforter for our bed. We select the city and neighborhood we like, plant gardens, prune bushes, water and mow lawns. There’s a lot that goes into creating and maintaining our little worlds. It can be a fulltime job, especially if you really care about it, if you have clear ideas about the best fabric for a couch or the best color for a kitchen. Waking up every day to what you find beautiful is worth the effort.

You know this, perhaps, because you’ve woken up to what you don’t find beautiful, or to what has deteriorated from neglect. The peeling paint, the rotting deck, the mossy roof, the overgrown bush. You lived for a time with the things that were broken or you found unbeautiful, growing accustomed to your own discontent, calling it normal even, just what life looks and feels like. Other people, you might come to believe, live happily in lovely places, but they’re just lucky. Your life is about enduring and making do, not choosing, not creating.

Writing is a great practice if you want to wake up every day to surroundings that please you. To write a story, there can be no enduring or making do, and every sentence and every word must be chosen. Choices cannot be made in a vacuum. To be right or wrong, which is to say to belong or not belong in your story, they must be in alignment with something that exists before the choice was made, which is always a feeling. And before a single word is chosen, the author must the choose the feeling from which their story will grow. This is how we write on purpose, and, if we’re honest, how we live on purpose.

Everything comes from something. Every tree was once a seed and every story was once an interesting idea. Yet some seeds go unplanted and some ideas are never pursued. I know how I want to feel, though I do not always feel that way. There has never been any question in my mind about it, other than whether I can feel that way, or am allowed to, or will be able to. To be the author of my life, I must accept that the answer to these questions is always yes, and how I feel is the first and most important choice I can ever make.

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

William KenowerWriting, William Kenower, ChoiceComment