A life of choice

The subject of choice is a profound and intricate topic of unending connections, possibilities, risks and rewards.  Like a game of chess, choice pits our limited wisdom against the unending wisdom of fate and chance.  With such overwhelming odds how can our narrow, limited view of life produce positive results?

Have you ever played chess with a master, the results were not pretty, I lost in five moves and I think he was being magnanimous in allowing me to even sit at the board.  My opening move was a pitiful king’s pawn, up two.  He moved a knight and it was good night for me.  In thinking about this past event I’m overjoyed that life is not a game of chess.

Too often we try to manipulate, strategize and maneuver our choices to gain advantage.  Some are arguably better at it than others, amassing great fortunes of wealth and influence.  But to most of us those skills are but a dream, a willful wish of grandeur, alive only in the lives of others but never within our limited sphere of knowing.

To the rest we plod and trudge, our feet firmly planted in the mud of daily existence, dreaming only of what might be.  But it is this question of what might be that gives man the most hope.  Especially for those with grit between their toes and grim under their nails, surviving with too little sleep and not enough money, hope is all we have, a hope that the faith we choose to have will in the end prevail and those promised blessing be revealed from the open widows of heaven above.

To think of life as a singular event, alive for a while to simply die, is not a choice I wish to make.  For in that level of finality all motivation ceases, all hope is shattered and the life worth living is left far behind.  It is the simple choice of choosing to live for a greater purpose than what we can fathom that gives our lives true meaning.  It is the choice to live for another that our lives are expanded beyond the mundane and exalted far beyond what our minds can imagine.

The greatest gift of mortality is our ability to choose, to discern and decide.  Thankfully we are not left to our own devises in playing the game of life, we have a champion, a chaperon, a master who with kindness and patients allows us to move, strategize and think, gently assisting, guiding our thoughts toward the right moves that will bring us to the path best for us.