We all get to choose how to live

Someone lives here. (Image by Siggy Nowak from Pixabay)

I was on my way to work one morning in my early twenties when I saw someone at a stoplight who changed the way I saw the world.

As a young adult in a new city, I had a rigid set of rules about how to live and, at the same time, a limited ability to operate in accordance with them.

These rules governed what I could eat and when, what I could spend, and how I could spend my time. It was my best attempt to tame the chaos of my circumstances.

No alcohol, no coffee, no staying up late. If I went anywhere within a mile or two of my apartment, I must walk there. Must shower before leaving the house, except to exercise. Certain music is only for nighttime. Sunscreen every day, and a hat if you’re out in the sun. No pets (can barely keep myself alive). And so on.

I managed a lot of these (as a Bahá’í, abstaining from alcohol was important to me). I probably stayed up late every night, though. I remember this period of time as a period of vacillation between doing what I thought was good for me and shamefully not doing so (for instance, chronically arriving at work two minutes late or running out of clean clothes). For someone with what I now recognize to be a huge amount of self-discipline, life was a struggle.

So there I was, about 8:40 AM, at a stoplight at the intersection of Freedom Parkway (now John Lewis Freedom Parkway) and Ralph McGill Boulevard in Atlanta, when a Jeep pulled up beside me.

The guy behind the wheel was blasting heavy metal, which caused me to turn and look. The top was off his car, revealing to me his entire life. Maybe thirty years old and bit on the stockier side, he was wearing shorts and a short-sleeve shirt that exposed tattoos on his legs and arms. He was smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee. He seemed consummately relaxed. At ease with himself. Was he on his way to work? It was hard to tell.

In that moment, I saw that we all get to choose how to live. Not everyone thinks it’s important to spend time outside on a sunny day. Some people would rather have cats than a life free of cat hair. Some people get married and have kids, some people don’t. Some people do a lot of drugs and somehow long lives; others overdose at a young age. Some people commit crimes and go to prison. Some people watch the news on TV every morning, others don’t. We all get to make choices. If our choices aren’t working for us, we can make different ones.

This realization didn’t change my life immediately. I still had a set of rigid rules that I needed to work through in order to find the ones that actually mattered. I still needed to learn to have compassion for myself when I failed or struggled. But I understood that my choices were my own, and that there were lots of different possibilities if my way wasn’t working.

Further, I had a new appreciation for the choices of others. If people didn’t do things the way I would do them, they weren’t necessarily wrong. My post-adolescent framework expanded to accommodate the idea that the people who liked music, movies, books, clothes and decor that I found silly or boring or ugly or loathsome — well, maybe they weren’t fools, as I had previously surmised. Maybe they had an entirely different context.

I know that these are not particularly unique insights, and I was arguably rather late in having them, coming from my tiny town and rural university. But remembering this moment with the guy in the Jeep does two things for me: First, it helps me remember that the adolescents and young adults I work with may have a similarly limited context for making sense of the world. Having this empathy to understand their worldview helps me to serve them better.

Second, I begin to understand that the children I encounter, whether they are students, friends, family, or my very own, will make their own choices about how to live. Indeed, for adolescents, this is already happening. I can teach, I can lead, I can guide, but I can’t coerce. People I care about will do things that don’t make sense to me, that don’t fit the way I think things should be — and that’s okay.

Even when it’s not okay (Jeep guy! I hope you stopped smoking!), it will have to be okay. Though we can ask them to adhere to our rules until adulthood, people are who they are. As the twenty-two-year-old Bob Dylan (who changed his surname from Zimmerman, dropped out of college, and left his family in Minnesota to meet his ailing idol, Woody Guthrie, in New York City) sang, “Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.”

We all get to choose how to live — that’s a threat and a promise.