A Matter of Choice

Sitting in a quaint Portland Café, in the hippie/trendy neighborhood of Hawthorne I stumbled upon an intriguing idea. I stumbled like this
- Why do I live in Los Angeles? I hate Los Angeles. Okay, I don’t hate Los Angeles. There are a lot of worse places to live. But either way, why?
- Because I have to live there for work.
- Because I can’t work in the movie business anywhere else.
- Where else could I make enough money to survive.
- The battle of the back and forth between liking and hating where I live and etc, etc, etc.

But where this led me was that I have so many excuses for hating it and yet for staying, wouldn’t it be amazing to make it a conscious choice. How many of my decisions are actual powerful, conscious decisions? I don’t know.

I’ve spent a lot of time, over the last ten years, particularly between the ages of 22 and 27 talking a big game about “Going wherever the roads of life take me.” And they’ve taken me pretty far, but I think it’s easy to forget that you are the one actually making those decisions when you reach a fork in the road, you’re the one who is taking the steps. I forget that constantly, especially in my head, and I play the excuse game, which is ridiculous.

Now, I do know If I am going to continue to live in California forever, but I would rather say that I am living there because I choose to do so, rather then being like, Well, I don’t have a choice, or my work is here (and that coming off as an excuse.) I’d like all my choices to really come off more like decisions and less like I fell into it.

It just seems so much stronger to take control of my life, and really more to the point, I think it’s about damn time that I become responsible for all of my decisions; actual, real internal responsibility for all of them. There are only so many outward/external factors that can really make us do something that we don’t want to do.

We’ll always be on this road of life til the end, so until that day, I’m gonna try to remember that I am the one making the choice when I see a fork.