礼品之路 ( Lǐpǐn zhī lù ) – The Gift of Will and Choice

It is undeniable.

What we receive is gift.

Beautiful gift.

And every gift is heavy with burden, perhaps even the seed of loss.

The gift of ‘will’ and ‘choice’ is immense.

Not unlimited.

For no one can ‘choose’ or ‘will’ to be a bird had they been born a man, about that there can be no argument.

And I often wonder how much we can will or choose, if we are not allowed, in the greater order of life and death and being, to do good and love and be kind?

Yet, rapists choose to destroy, unhindered, alongside corporate and political scammers, according to their own will, while another chooses to love and be kind, even to their own loss and detriment.

And men change their ways, often seemingly without warning, mid-stride, good men suddenly making bad choices and evil men choosing what seems like love, as if this had always been their way.

That we can choose, are able to choose, and have a will which is free in many ways, is without a doubt.

We choose careers and where to live.

We choose people with whom to share life and others to exclude.

We choose to make ourselves part of the lives of others or to be apart.

We choose to have children, or to abandon them, to love them or to destroy them.

Nothing stops us.

Every day filled with the flavor of all we choose, from such simple things as when to get up, what to wear and what to eat for brealfast, to much more complex things such as how we will provide for our family or how we will respond to dissapointment and adversity.

Whether we are truly able to choose what is good and beautiful, unaffected by our Origin, is something I do not know.

I ponder it, often, existentially.

Sensing that even the most valiant of our kind is in need of the affections of our Origin, in order to come to a place where we apply this gift of will and choice in such a way that it may be always beautiful.

For when we choose, we always choose positively in a very small sense and negatively in unimaginable ways.

In choosing a life partner we choose one person with whom we share our short existence in a deep and intimate way.

At the same time we choose against every other person in existence.

We choose that none of them, not even one, may share my life in the way that this person will.

In choosing to be in one place, we choose not to be in any other place, not to be in a million other places, at this very moment.

In choosing to spend my time with one person, I choose not to spend this time with any other person.

In choosing “Aa”, choosing to have “Aa” or be with “Aa” or go to “Aa” or experience “Aa” or do “Aa”, we choose to exclude “Bb” through “Zz”.

Every choice we make so small and yet so very large.

And in choosing, we change.

The future.

And our selves.

We cannot choose to be in a million places all at once.

We cannot choose to engage a million people in a single moment.

Our will is not limitless.

We are not limitless.

Perhaps this is why, so many times, we choose to forego choice, rather giving ourselves to the will and choice of others, to be slung around and carried off like a slave.

But in not choosing, even in not choosing, we make a choice.

We choose to allow.

Or give up.

Our will.

And our ‘self’, for without our will, we are the bear who is bound to nature, to maul without hesitation and hibernate when winter comes, to breed without emotion and kill our off-spring if the opportunity presents itself.

Of course, we can change our mind, this you know too.

People choose a life partner whom they abandon after only a few years, while life is still full.

We choose to be sexualy active, and choose to abort.

We choose to buy a car and sell it again.

To live at the coast, to later move to the mountains.

And we know too, when it comes to cars and clothes and food, our choices do not need to be cast in stone.

They can be abandoned.

Even when it comes to careers or our geography, it is possible to change our mind, to move on to a new way of occupying ourselves and a new place to live.

But when it comes to our being, to who we are and how we live it is a little different, for at the heart of our existence there lives a guide, an instrument of flesh and blood and spirit, earth and Wind combined, which is somehow less effective in the absence of either part.

You’ve been told we are spirit in a body. Trapped for a while, until we are freed from this entrapment by death.

Or by others, that spirit is a mere myth, a story we create in order to soothe ourselves, like a baby sucking a pacifier.

Both are lies.

We are earth and Wind.

Matter and soul.

Body and spirit.

Our being not trapped in a perishable vessel, but woven together into a single entity, so that we are, everything that never existed before we were brought into being.

What I’m realizing is this: in will and choice we receive the gift of this in the most profound way when we come to see that serendipitous synergy is completeness.

Conflict, war, removed as we embrace ourselves in our entirety, within the order of our cosmos.

Fashioned willfully, by our Origin, from what is now perishable earth, trapped in time, but which was never and will never be comprehensively perishable, as this moment of seeming degredation is but a moment in timeless eternity.

And so, our will and choice becomes free-est, when we see ourselves as coming from our Origin.

Our value hidden in Them.

Never seperated from They Who are our Source and Sourceror, but enabled to move inside of time and be, limited by time and space, for the moment, yet our will and choice limitlessly affecting as we are affected by Their Will and Choice, which is not bound by the limitation of one at a time.

One place,

One person.

One thing.

One moment.

But free to Will and Choose in every place, even those places of which we know nothing.

Every person, who’ve been and are and was and will be.

Everything that was and is and comes.

In time that has no beginning or end, beyond yesterday and tomorrow, as everything is at once, as it unfolds chronologically over years and decades and millenia and an immeasurable expanse of existence we cannot comprehend.

I fret about tomorrow.

I fret about this moment.

Our Origin, is and was are and will be.

In this moment.

In every other moment.

Those which are seemingly yet to come, to our perception and those which were, before our coming into being.

Their Will and Choice inside all of it, alongside ours, as we increasingly populate Their World.

Their World.

This we must not forget.

For They are our Origin.

They are the Origin, without origin, from Whom every thing is.

And They are kind.

They are love.

They are peace.

And we, so all the stories, which have ever been told by our kind ring true from the Far East to the deepest West, from the highest Mountain Village to the smallest Coastal Town, we are precious to Them.

Not an accident or a dissapointment.

We are the ‘crown’ of all They Willed and Chose and Will and Choose and will Will and Choose.

We are the reason, in so many ways, ‘us’ from the Genesis of our kind, into Eternity, why all of this is.

A place to be.

A place which will sustain us.

If we choose.

In which we can become and apply our will.

Freely.

And so I encourage you not to be afraid.

For this gift, although tremendous, it is not outside of our ability to master.

It is the seed of creation.

The creative power planted in us.