January 8, 2007 – Warm, clear. I’ve learned a number of things this year, and am still learning. One thing is that one of the threads of life is choices. I am, in many ways, the choices I make. Every day is a choice, and almost everything I do – family, work, friends, life, ethics, the treatment of other people – is a choice.
  Thomas Merton wrote that the mere ability to choose between good and evil is the lowest limit of freedom, and the only thing that is free about it is the fact that we can choose good, at any time. To the extend that we are free to choose wrong or evil, then we are not free. To choose to do wrong, or evil destroys freedom.
   We live in a culture that explains, excuses, accounts for things, and in many ways that seems merciful to me. We don’t kill or burn sick people anymore, we try and account for their behavior, and draw lines between conscious wrongdoing and the involuntary account.
   Yet I also believe in the awful fatefulness and hope of the choices we make. We are accountable for them, in this world or the next. We have to answer for them, to our families, our friends, and ourselves. We are responsible for what we do. Every day is a choice, and every decision is a choice, an opportunity, a definition of us,  a journey, a statement about who we are, who we want to be, where we have been, where we are going. That’s the fateful part. We will answer for the choices we make, one way or the other. I believe that.
  The hopeful part is this. We can always choose to be better. To do better. To be healthier, wiser, more generous. To learn, grow, and change.  To ease pain, to avoid causing pain. Carolyn Heilbrun wrote that every day is a choice. Every morning, she said, she got up in the morning and decided that day, she chose to live, and to live well.
   I have to say I love that idea, that affirmation, the notion of every day being a choice, an opportunity to decide to live, and to live well. I think that is the freedom Merton was talking about.