Der mentsh trakht un Gott lakht

It has always amused me that people could dismiss the complaints of others with the platitude that we all have to live with our choices.

It is sobering to realize that every choice we make, every action we take, however trivial, might have serious consequences, which move forward in an endless wave, affecting people through eternity. La Rochefoucauld said, “There is scarcely a single man sufficiently aware to know all the evil he does.” I believe we don’t know all the good we do, either. A few years ago I gave a frantic man a quarter for a parking meter. As he ran off, he yelled over his shoulder that I had saved his life. I will never know what effect I had on his family, his career. We can never even know how the lives of the strangers we pass on the street might be changed by the casual smile or scowl on our face. So how can we make wise decisions if we face some alternatives with only a superficial awareness of the consequences?

We are all familiar with the that’s-good-that’s-bad story. I was once stunned not to be hired as communications director in the Calgary office of the company I worked for. But the office closed six months later and the people who had interviewed me were back in Ottawa looking for new jobs. The eventual date of my dismissal from that company was one month after my sixtieth birthday. That meant I could not collect a lump sum payout but had to be content with what I thought was a paltry company pension. I resented having my choices limited; there was a fortune waiting for me in the stock market. But if I had invested the money on my own, market conditions would have cut my savings in half within three years. Not only did that not happen, but the company soon returned a significant portion of the money I had contributed to the pension fund over the years because it had accumulated excess funds. And my pension continues.

We can plan forever, but we must respond to reality, rolling with the punches and learning from the good as well as from the bad. The lessons can be profound.

Every choice we make limits our ability to do some other things. Every door might open on a new world of opportunity, or it might show us another door. Or it might take us out of the game altogether. As humans, we have only the most rudimentary sense of cause and effect. Even when we think we understand the consequences of our actions, we sometimes act in darkness, and often in a fog. It is almost impossible to escape the haze of shortsightedness that stands between us and our choices.

Sometimes it helps us cope with life to say we have lived by our principles, to believe that our actions have been guided by the best evidence, to assert our faith that everything will be all right in the end. In the broadest sense, we may find deep comfort in these beliefs. But when we hit the deepest ruts and the biggest bumps along the road, they are only words. It is no comfort to realize that our choices brought us to the present circumstances.

All of which leads me to my next post, which deals with some of the realities Catherine and I have had to face since we moved west six months ago.