To begin at the beginning—and I said this would be obvious—we did not choose to be born. Or to be born as a human being. However you view the world that you know, whatever framework of meaning you might use to contemplate your momentous birth, you were most definitely not the one who decided that you would be a human and not a tadpole or a poodle or a grizzly bear.

It follows that you also did not decide what hormones would be dominant in the microscopic wiggly something that was your first shape. So one of the first pieces of your identity, which usually determines the kind of name you get, was not your choice. Okay, changing names is an option; even changing gender is now possible. What is not possible to change is what you came into the world with in the first place.

 Ditto for your parents and your surroundings. You did not choose the year of your birth or the location. You did not choose the economic situation of your mother (or her relationship to your father), the color of your skin, your genetic make-up, your biological relatives, your first language, the culture in which you practiced that language, your first notions of spirituality. None of those momentous determiners out of which come so much of what makes you who you are were chosen by you. Not one.  

 So we cannot logically claim credit for any of those momentous determiners of our identity. Nor can we blame ourselves or anyone else, for what was not ever chosen, by us or them.  

 Am I belabouring the obvious here? Yes, I am. Because too many discussions—in our public squares, in our courts, in our governments, in our living rooms—ignore the obvious. Should a child born in a refugee camp or in city slums be despised for being poor? No. She did not choose poverty. Should the child with millions in her bank account before she can count to ten be respected for that very fact? No. She did not choose it or earn it. Should the dark-skinned individual be blamed for her skin? Or be made into a curiosity because of her kinky hair? No, absolutely not.  

 Let me be specific and personal. I do not deserve praise or blame for being a woman or being light-skinned or even for being born into a family and culture that valued hard work and education. Whatever advantages were granted to me simply because of where and when I was born were indeed mine to use or not to use, but I need to remember two facts. One is that not everyone comes into the world with similar choices available; two is that I actually had considerably less choice in many ways than I once imagined. I could not, for example, as a teenager in a small Mennonite town, have chosen to become Muslim—that was not within the range of possibility for me until I was in my thirties or forties probably, once I had actually met Muslims and learned something about Islam.

 We tend to treat religion and sometimes politics as well as if those stances can be freely chosen from a wide spectrum of offerings. Not so. It would, for example, have been actually impossible for someone living in Shakespeare’s time to become an atheist. The very concept had not yet taken shape. One could be Catholic or Protestant—that choice had become available, probably within Shakespeare’s living memory. Mostly, though, one was what one had been born to.  

 To imagine that it is readily possible to choose from many religions is a modern idea not often sufficiently qualified by the fact that our initial worldview, through which we view all subsequent options, is given to us before we are old enough to choose anything. I would argue that “choosing” our political views is equally contingent upon the culture in which we have first learned to think politically and the political surroundings to which we have been subsequently exposed. Surely that fact should temper any impulses we might have to label the “other” party as the enemy or to see ourselves as supremely righteous and clever for belonging to “our” party. Not that changing a political stance is impossible, nor that converting to another faith is impossible. Clearly not. As Viktor Frankl wrote, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.” Nevertheless, an acknowledgement of contingencies that shape habitual responses could help to defuse tense conversations.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.

Victor Frankl

 Popular metaphors regarding the philosophically fraught business of choosing include the well-used image of “playing the hand that we were dealt.” When playing poker or bridge or even solitaire, our ability to choose is severely limited, not only by the cards that are actually in our hand for each round of play but also by the rules of the game. Moreover, how we play our cards will depend on who else is sitting around the table (are they highly competitive, poor losers, cheaters, family members, strangers?) and what the stakes might be (are we playing for peanuts, or laughs, or hundred dollar bills?).

 Theoretical speculation and playful metaphors aside, may I ask as politely as I can, what is going on in the current intensity of political and racial language, all amid an insistence on “freedom of choice”? As if everyone has available all manner of choices.  

Let me try to illustrate: it is highly unlikely that I will choose my response to a police officer on my front step from an infinite list of options because the very fact that I have a front step on which the officer can stand already rules out quite a few possibilities, such as an immediate fear of eviction. The additional fact that it is highly likely the officer will have the same color of skin as I do rules out more possibilities. I will still probably feel real fear, but it will be fear that someone I love has been hurt in an accident, not fear that I’m about to be arrested for something I may or may not have done. In other words, I enter a particular event out of my own context, shaped by various givens, and by the experiences I have lived through before that moment, only some of which I could have chosen.   

  I belong to the Boomer generation; that means that my economic opportunities will have been different than those of my parents and different again from those of my children, and of my grandchildren. My parents were immigrants, so it’s no surprise that I learned the virtues of hard work and education. Then again, my parents were Mennonite and I was a girl, which means that the value of hard work applied but the value of education would have been tempered by certain assumptions about women’s place in the world. Could I have, as a teen, decided I was going to be Christian missionary? Yes, definitely. That option was endorsed by pretty well everyone I knew. Could I have decided to become a politician and hope to become premier of the province? Not in my wildest dreams. Could such options have opened up for me later in my adult years? Possibly, but with great difficulty.

 Buried beneath the obvious limits set by culture and religion and language and economic opportunity is the shaping of the individual personality which unfolds in a mysterious symbiotic process of givens and choices, each of which exercises influence on future choices and even on the terms in which memories are recalled. Psychologists have studied these variables since psychology became a recognized science. Long before that, though, parents have agonized over causes and effects ever since Adam and Eve somehow ended up with a devout and biddable shepherd and a jealous gardener turned murderer.

In other words, we do all have choices to make, important choices, which we make within a range of possibilities, choices for which we are responsible. I’m not arguing for complete determinism, just pointing out the inevitable limits of free will – limits that should curb our judgmental impulses and intemperate rhetoric.

The good news, as I see it, is that if we choose to, we can expand our range of possibilities. While it’s true that we were all gifted with the worldview through which we first tried to make sense of who we were, we can choose to widen that worldview, just by letting ourselves hear other stories. I can dismiss as nonsense your belief that houses should be always immaculate, for instance, or I can ask to hear your story about how that belief came to be yours. In the process of telling and listening, both of us could adjust our perspectives.

  I admit that our capacity to absorb new information is limited. It is not possible to know everything and to hear everyone’s story with sympathetic mind. The first action is limited by the sheer abundance of stuff to know, and the second is limited by one’s emotional and imaginative capacity, which has not been developed equally in all children. Nevertheless, each story I listen to with as open a mind as I can manage will exercise my imaginative faculties and enlarge my perspective.

 Then perhaps I can learn to defer judgment or animosity until I have heard more of the story. That’s a choice that becomes ever more available as I practice it.     

To be continued.  . . . .