How much of life can be considered a choice? Where is the line between chance, coincidence, and choice? Who decides what crosses that line, what breaks those boundaries? 

Many people convince themselves that the arduous decisions they made were the last resort, that there was no other choice. As though they didn't decide to carry out that action, as though their feelings bound them helpless, unable to make a logical decision. Maybe I am nothing but another pretentious fool pretending to know about life and its circumstances. But when it comes down to it life is a choice, everything in it is based on choice, and the decisions we make dictate us as people, and the society we live in. 

Take love, for example, love, the age-old feeling people enjoy gushing about. It's spontaneity, how it creeps up on you. If a sceptical teenager were to suggest that love was a choice, there would be all around head shakes, murmurs of naivety, and how someday they’ll learn. But how on earth could a feeling felt on so many levels- in such varied circumstances ever not be a choice? We as people choose to open ourselves up to love. Feelings may be inevitable, but love itself? Loving is a choice. No matter its form or extremity people chose to open their lives, their hearts even to love: a smile across the classroom, a downloading of an app, an offer of a walk home. Actions we decide on open opportunities for anything.

Society likes to demean the newest ways to show love, as it supposedly consists of false advertising of yourself on social media; and not much else. They think love cannot possibly be authentic in this day and age. Obtuse thoughts they chose to share. The choice to talk to people, online or in person, is a decision to see if love will strike you. Be it romantic, platonic, or even reconnecting with familial love. Choosing love, choosing to love, is still authentic. Love is honesty, love is communication. Love is the choices we make.

The decisions people make will tell you more about them than their words ever will. The choices people make are far more important than how they display themselves to the world. You may consider someone to be abrasive, or arrogant from the way their words come off in a professional environment. That same person may go home and start researching how to read different social cues, or maybe you’ve chosen to interpret them to be that way, based on an unknown judgement or hidden bias. You cannot assume anything about anyone based on superficial, surface-level interpretations. Actions they choose to make will forever say more than anything else. That's not to say words are meaningless- words matter a great deal. But again, are a choice. Sometimes a simple, “How are you?” Is enough to make my day, if the right person chooses to voice it. Take a friend of mine as an example, the best communicator I know, who never shies away from sharing their genuine thoughts, a choice they make, a blessing they bestow, which brightens up my, and I’m sure many other people's lives. 

Let’s briefly talk about The Butterfly Effect in psychology, defined in simple terms to be the fragility of large systems (social or other) to minuscule events perhaps otherwise thought of as insignificant, which could cause major, entirely unpredicted effects. The name stems from butterfly wings fluttering in one part of the world, having an effect, or being the cause of a tornado in another part of the universe. The Butterfly Theory is commonly referred to in the Chaos Theory and is used to talk about nonlinear casual connections. This particular theory says a lot about what I think choices are or can be. Our impact on the world around us is far greater than people will try to tell you it is. Our actions echo, always. Be that in the butterfly effect, or the domino. 

Your actions are not now, and will not ever be irrelevant. They matter, you matter, they always will. You have left your mark on the world by unambiguously existing. We as humans never need to worry about being forgotten after passing- nothing does. Simply breathing, existing, and taking up our part of the world in place ensures that we are human, we are here, we are infinite. For the universe could never forget us, the chance of us being here at this time, the odds we have beaten, the odds we will beat is quite remarkable. As well as, of course, the choices we make. We are the past; we are the present; we are the future; we are here.