Choosing

Guest writer: The Body Electric

We value choice in almost all areas of our lives. When we lived in southern California, the huge variety of stuff for sale in the supermarkets sometimes confounded me. An entire shelf full of mayonnaise! Sausages? Low fat, nitrate free, organic, meatless and so on. Buy a coffee? An economist could probably make an argument that the price difference between Starbucks coffee and the coffee from a regular coffeeshop here in Singapore reflects the choice available to me at Starbucks: espresso, latte, low-fat, decaf, mocha and so on. Choice, it seems, is a good thing, something worth paying a premium for.

A liberal democracy enshrines the right to choose as an almost inalienable aspect of life. People who do not choose their leaders cannot possibly live in a healthy, vibrant polity. A consumerist society lives by the accumulated choices of its participants. Not only do I have the right to choose what to buy, but I also want to have the right to choose when to buy, and how to buy, and from whom to buy.

On Facebook, I can choose whether or not to accept someone as a friend. Just a few days ago, someone I am certain I have never met sent me a request to become a friend. When I look at this person's age, background and other friends (and we do not have any friends in common), I can only conclude that he's made a mistake and probably thinks I'm some other Keith Tan. But I hesitate to exercise my choice. I hesitate, on the one hand, to invite him into my virtual life on Facebook. On the other hand, I feel reluctant to cut him off completely. Choice has paralyzed me.

Some of the biggest decisions in my life have reflected the exercise of choice. I chose to get married to a beautiful, gentle woman whose heart unfailingly chooses compassion each time. I chose to become a father twice, now three times over. I chose to accept the Love that showers me, every day, with the ability to love back, to bless, to hope, to believe, passionately, sometimes blindly, that things will get better. Sometimes I forget that the choices available to me reflect the almost insensible luxuriousness of my life. Many people do not have the luxury of choosing between chocolate chip and vanilla ice cream. Many people do not have the luxury of choosing to start a life together with a partner they love and someone else they only have the vaguest relationship with.

So this is what I will tell each of my children one day, and in particular, the one whom we chose specially:

Before the beginning of the world, God chose you for me. And God chose me for you.

And when your life began, as a tiny clump of cells or as a tiny clump of ideas, I would lie awake wondering about the choices before me and the choices that you would have one day.

How would I do as a father? What would I read to you? What games would I play? Should I teach you the difference between a Tiger beer and all the other nasty stuff or let you find out yourself?

What if you had problems that I didn't know how to solve? What if you came to me one day with your heart broken by the world and I had no words to say to comfort you? What if you decided you wanted nothing to do with the rest of your family? What if you broke my heart one day?

And time and again, the answer would come back. I chose you. As God chose me with all my messiness, all my failures, all my dismal fears and my whining, whinging nature, I chose you. I chose you knowing that you might one day wrench my heart in two. I chose you knowing that you would change me, that I would never, ever be the same man again once I saw you, once I held you in my arms, once you put your tiny fingers in my hands.

I chose you. And I hope that you will choose to embrace the richness and vividness of life with wholeness, with excitement, with adventure, with compassion. That you will choose people over things, faith over cynicism, love over indifference, giving over grasping.

And that's my great, audacious hope for you.