Does that title sound as confusing to you as it does to me? Cuz it’s been driving me nuts.

I’ve been wrestling with two very different principles/concepts over the last few months writing about choice. The first is one about the nature of choice. It is always moving “forward” in time. I can’t make a choice about something I was deciding yesterday, it is always the future. And so when I write my posts, to make those choices properly oriented, I always write “I choose to…”. Reflecting on how I approached the decision that day, and reflecting too that it has implications for the future. It’s a great argument, I believe in it strongly. My choices are always about moving forward, whenever possible. I avoid regret, I don’t believe it’s a useful pasttime. You make the decisions you make with the best information you have at the time, and if you do it consciously, aware of what you are doing, and in touch with who you are, it’s relatively impossible to make a “wrong” decision. It doesn’t mean everything will turn out the way you want, you won’t get the results right, but the decision itself is and was rarely “wrong”. You might learn from how you made the decision, or the info you relied on, and you can review for “improvement”, but anything else is just Monday morning quarterbacking.

And yet the grammarian in me finds writing the posts weird for tense. I write them at the end of the day about my exploits in the last 18 hours, and so it is always past tense. So saying “I choose…” annoys the grammarian in me. It also seems a bit odd to say at 11:59 p.m. that “Today I choose…”. What? In the last 30 seconds of the day?

I liked the immediacy of “I choose…” and the reaffirmation that I live with decisions going forward. But I’ve danced on the head of a grammar pin too many times. I’m going to switch the title.

I know that kind of “meta” discussion doesn’t matter to anyone but me, probably, but after all, it’s my choice. 😉

And today I chose to choose choice, and my choice was to choose chose.

What choices did you make today?