Making Choices: The Wisdom of Doc and Nathan

Let's go to the movies ...

Doc Holliday: What did you want?

Wyatt Earp: Just to live a normal life.

Doc Holliday: There's no normal life, Wyatt. There's just life.

Tombstone
Kurt Russell, as Wyatt Earp, Val Kilmer, as Doc Holliday

Just life. Just. So.

Each day we are confronted with a choice: life or death? Are we born anew each morning, or do we choose the waking death of sleepwalking? Do we daily choose to create a life--an authentic self--or do we allow ourselves to be drug along by society’s conventions and norms into a “normal life,” which is to say, an “average life”? (The Norm refers to a standard: Average is the mean, the ordinary.)

Life or death?

A True Self or an average self?

Accountable or Victim?

Of all the condemnations that may be justly placed at Freud’s feet, for me the most troubling is his deterministic view of human nature: his denial of free-will, of the human capacity for making free-choices (which he would, in general, refer to as wishful thinking). This, of course, is a logical conclusion of one who denies moral accountability.

As Christians so often sneer at the mere mentioning of Freud’s name, it is interesting that so many of these same people live their lives according to his psychological model. Life comes, as it will: “There is nothing I can do about it.” Life is as my culture/ environment shaped me.” In other words, “life” makes choices for me via circumstances. “I am as I am because my dad yelled at me, my mother was never there, my culture shaped me, he did this to me, she refused to do that for me, they wouldn’t accept any other behavior: in other words, I Am a Victim. Psychological and Biological DNA Rules.” Of course, some Christians place a religious veneer on such determinism and call it God’s Sovereignty, thus refusing accountability for the person that is being created. “I couldn’t help it: he/she/they/it made me this way.”

This is not to suggest that God is not in charge of history: mine, yours, ours. However, as I understand God’s ways with us humans, His will is worked out through our very real free choices. Most of us have heard people ask, “Why pray if God is sovereign?” Simple. Because God has chosen to bring His will about via our prayers. So, as we make choices as to the person we will become, as we go about artistically creating our unique selves, we become the person we are destined to become.

My point here is not to unravel a mystery that cannot be unraveled—that is why it is called a Mystery—but to remind us that we have choices to make: choices that we are accountable for. And the specific choice I am referring to is this: who do you wish to become? What is to be Your Way of Being as you go through life?


The Last Samurai
Tom Cruise as Captain Nathan Algren, and Ken Watanabe as Katsumoto

Nathan Algren: I studied war at a place called West Point. They taught us about a battle called Thermopylae. Three hundred brave warriors held off the king of Persia's army of a million men. For two days they made them pay so dearly that the king lost all appetite for further invasion ... I have some thoughts about the battle tomorrow.

Katsumoto: Do you really think we can defeat them?

Nathan Algren: I sure as hell want to find out.

Katsumoto: You believe a man can change his destiny?

Nathan Algren: No ... But I think a man cannot know his destiny. He can only do what he can, until his destiny is revealed.


Do what you can.

What can you do?

You can make choices. You can choose to go about creating a life, an authentic self, or you can choose to allow people, circumstances and your environment to make the choices for you. As Isabel Allende noted: “You are the storyteller of your own life, and you can create your own legend or not.”

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2008