On Choosing

“What I’ve taken away: if anyone asks you to spring down a gravel road in your bare feet? Kindly decline. If someone asks you to slowly walk into a lake fully clothed at sunrise? Absolutely do it.” – Annie Murphy

In this, the year of Covid, an anonymous poster once said, “Beware the Ides of March and every day thereafter.” I would raise this Shakespearean reference with, “When sorrows come, they come not single spies. But in battalions!” Or so it seems. And in that seeming, we could arguably provide a litany of examples. Complete with footnotes from Relvelations.

In reviewing my own Covid Continuum, ranging from insomnia-Netflix-in-bed-at-2am-stints and phantom-earthquake-body-jolts-due-to-neighbors-car-backfiring (low points in case that wasn’t obvious) to prouder moments of, I-exercized-made-my-bed-and-even-put-the-button-on-my-cardigan-after-3-months-of-it-sitting-on-my-chair. This post isn’t going to be a pep-talk. There are far better, more eloquent essays and posts floating out in cyber-land that have both moved me and overwhelmed me. I only offer my attempt at looking at a pattern I see slowly emerging as silver-linings from the last 6 months.

And that is: choices.

No is a complete sentence, after all.

I tell my students to look for patterns. What do they notice happening in novels over and over again? Or their own thoughts and writing? The refrain find the patterns seems to have been a good talisman in many ways in my world over the years.

When I was a kid I always noticed the rainbows that a crystal lamp made on the walls in my entryway. They were different shapes—all comforting, and involved the sun. The facets and light created bouncing patterns on the white walls. All from a few crystals.

We Mormons know how to talk about choices and choosing the right. We’re good at offering pithy one-liners on agency, but I started noticing the lack in my own understanding of this deep and intensely layered principle. Maybe it was the extra time I had to sit and stare at light on the walls, contemplating where I was in life, but I started noticing that I needed a more faceted understanding to show me the spectrum of light in choice.

I started realizing the pattern of passivity in my understanding of choice and agency. Noticing that “doing good things and following the rules” doesn’t guarantee that person to arrive on my doorstep to confess their love, or a new exciting opportunity just begging for me to join in. I was bugged. Sometimes I think we’re sold a well-intentioned bill of goods that makes us think the plan and our righteousness owes us the life we want. We see it – or think we see it – in people around us. The girl who only ate green beans at lunch every day in high school has everything on her life checklist checked off. The neighbor next door prayed for a week and then got her miracle. There’s a lot of gray space that isn’t so simple as examples we tout from the pulpit.

I’m still working on this, but I see the nuanced colors in choice and agency. A new pattern to discover and try to act on.  I recently listened to a podcast two friends started that helped me see this pattern clearly. In the episode they were discussing personal revelation and how we all have this gift and power and can choose to activate it. Megan, a dear friend and Segullah writer, whose words resonate deeply with me said, “I decided I was going to believe that God could help me…that decision changed my ability to receive revelation.” It is a new pattern of which I want to strive. It’s in the knowing that comes when we do all we can and then choose to believe anyway. This, I’m thinking, helps us come fully into our own.